New to NSF: Recruiting and Retaining Students into Computing

Texas A&M University-San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

The Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program) aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This project at Texas A&M University-San Antonio will advance the aims of the HSI Program by increasing the retention and completion rates of students in computer science and to better equip them to achieve careers cyber security. The project also plans to increase the number of transfer of students who transfer from two-year colleges into computer science programs at the University. The project plans to integrate cyber security topics throughout the entire computer science curriculum, so that students will obtain an NSA Cyber Defense Education certificate upon graduation. This certification can increase the competitiveness of the graduates in high-demand jobs. The objectives of this program are to broaden and strengthen the pipeline of students, including Hispanic students, entering the field of computing and cyber security. To meet workforce demands, the project will develop a computer science undergraduate computer science program in which cyber security topics are integrated throughout the curriculum. The project also seeks to increase the retention rates and strengthen the marketability of students by enabling student to automatically earn a certificate in cyber security education upon graduation. Computer science researchers will collaborate with curriculum and instruction researchers to develop cyber security modules for use throughout the computer science curriculum. These modules will contextualize computing topics via a cyber security lens. To assist in the retention of students, the cyber security modules will use Model Eliciting Activities, a teaching and learning methodology that has been demonstrated to be particularly effective for women and other groups that are underrepresented in engineering. The project includes a partnership between the team of computing and education researchers at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and the computing departments of rural Laredo Community College and urban San Antonio College, both of which are Hispanic-serving community colleges. The community college partnerships will increase opportunities for student transfer, while the curriculum changes and use of inclusive pedagogy should increase the likelihood that students persist and graduate with degrees in computing that can enable them to launch careers within computing fields. Through a design experiment methodology, the project will investigate the impact of Model Eliciting Activities and the incorporation of cyber security on instructor effectiveness and student attitudes and performance. This research results could inform the practices of other computer science and related programs that seek to increase student success and diversity in computing programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.