Abstract
The interest of girls in computing drops early during primary and secondary education, with minimal recovery in later education stages. In combination with the growing shortage of qualified computer science personnel, this is becoming a major issue, and also a target of numerous studies that examine measures, interventions, and strategies to boost girls’ commitment to computing. Yet, the results of existing studies are difficult to navigate, and hence are being very rarely employed in classrooms. In this paper, we summarize the existing body of knowledge on the effective interventions to recruit and retain girls in computer science education, intending to equip educators with a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate map of interventions recommended in the existing literature. To this end, we perform an aggregated umbrella literature review of 11 existing reviews on the topic, together accumulating joined knowledge from over 800 publications, and formulate the findings in a map of 22 concrete interventions structured in six groups according to their phase and purpose.
Highlights
As the world transitions to an increasingly digital economy, most countries lack qualified personnel in jobs related to computer science, a shortage that sheds light on Educational and Information Technologies (2021) 26:2811–2829 critically low representation of women in this industry (Powell and Chang 2016)
Because of the unclear goal of the known interventions, strategies and measures in the classroom, resulting in some cases from the vague definition of targeted changes, it is especially hard to decide what are the necessary interventions to retain the attention of girls during the school or non-school computer science lessons
Since numerous comprehensive studies have attempted to map the state of the art of the measures of girls engagement within computer science education (Brotman and Moore 2008; Siiman et al 2014; Boston and Cimpian 2018), we have decided to adopt a systematic aggregated review method by Gough et al (2013) and Aromataris et al (2015), who suggest approaching a systematic literature review via combining existing reviews with the later synthesis of further publications in the time period following the date of publication of the identified reviews
Summary
As the world transitions to an increasingly digital economy, most countries lack qualified personnel in jobs related to computer science, a shortage that sheds light on Educational and Information Technologies (2021) 26:2811–2829 critically low representation of women in this industry (Powell and Chang 2016). Despite interventions over the past decade, the gender gap in computing seems to be increasing and worldwide, almost everywhere fewer than one in five computer science graduates are female (Schlegel 2016). This urges fundamental changes in the way we approach early education of girls in computer science and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) (Gorbacheva et al 2019), as the declining interest of girls in these disciplines seems to be preventable through tailoring education to girls’ specific needs to help them embrace computing (Accenture 2016). Because of the unclear goal of the known interventions, strategies and measures in the classroom, resulting in some cases from the vague definition of targeted changes (e.g., increased motivation or change of perception), it is especially hard to decide what are the necessary interventions to retain the attention of girls during the school or non-school computer science lessons
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