EAGER: Broadening Participation in Undergraduate Computing Literature Matrix Resource

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California--Los Angeles will develop a literature matrix resource that will allow practitioners, researchers, non-profits, industry, and others interested in broadening participation in computing (BPC) to identify and assess relevant literature to inform their work. Currently, the Principal Investigator Dr. Linda Sax leads a national, mixed-method research project (the BRAID Research project) focused on efforts to recruit and retain women and students of color in undergraduate computing majors. Through this work, Dr. Sax and her research team have developed methodologies to identify and catalogue scholarship that addresses topics relevant to BPC work. Building off that work, the team will curate a library of peer-reviewed literature on the topic of broadening participation in undergraduate computing that allows a user to search the library's content by key fields(year, journal, discipline, methodological approach, sample size, etc.) as well as review summary information. To identify pieces and create content for the literature matrix, Dr. Sax and her team will draw on best practices for reviewing and synthesizing literature. In doing so, they will be able to leverage their social science expertise to develop a much-needed resource for the BPC community. The resource will be useful to individuals with little background in the social sciences who are seeking to understand more about best practices to diversify computing. At the same time, it will be useful for social science researchers, enabling them to conduct more thorough syntheses of the extant literature to ground future research, identify gaps in our knowledge, and develop new research products. It will make it easier for researchers and practitioners alike to assess the available research. This work will be of particular use to National Science Foundation (NSF) Principal Investigators (PIs) working on proposals and awards from the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate which is currently piloting a BPC requirement for some of their submissions. The constructed literature matrix is expected to be available through the BPCNet.org resource collection designed for those CISE PIs, making it easier for them to identify those practices that are well-established in research. 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.