Author(s):
Need: Jobs are forecasted to grow quickly in the coming decade in computer science and IT, and colleges are not producing enough graduates to keep up. The significant demand for IT professionals and the shortage of qualified graduates make it imperative to enhance the efficacy and retention rates of STEM education, particularly in community colleges, which are crucial for training a diverse technological workforce. Project-based learning (PBL) has emerged as a promising educational strategy to engage and retain students in STEM fields, by not only training them in real-world skills, but in imparting the confidence they need to persist in these majors and careers. However, PBL can be resource-intensive for both instructors and students, so there is a need for tools to empower community college instructors to teach in this way.Guiding Question: This project investigates how the integration of PBL into community college curricula affects student persistence in CS/IT courses, focusing on the development of self-efficacy, belongingness and STEM identity among students, especially those from underrepresented groups.Outcomes: Our study, spanning fifteen sections of an introductory Python course using project-based learning across six community colleges, indicates that students who complete the course achieve high self-efficacy for the field. Despite the success of our autograded, real-world projects for students who persisted, we found that persistence, and hence success, in the course was tied to course modality, with face-to-face instruction greatly outperforming online classes, and students in online, self-paced versions of the course had the least persistence. Face-to-face instructors employed strategies including explicit instruction in how to break up large problems, teaching practical debugging strategies, and individual tutoring for struggling students. These practices and others are motivating our emerging research into ways of providing scaffolding and a sense of belonging even in institutions that cannot afford to provide on-premises instruction.Broader Impacts: The insights gained from this research are expected to contribute to the broader goals of the SAIL-CC initiative by enhancing the pedagogical approaches and support structures within community colleges. This work supports the project’s aim to produce scalable, sustainable educational practices that can be adapted to diverse learning environments, including student populations for whom effective CS education has not been available in the past, thereby increasing the number of well-prepared IT professionals entering the workforce.
Coauthors
Christopher Bogart, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA; Marshall An, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA; Eric Keylor, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA; Pawanjeet Singh, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA; Jaromir Savelka, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA; Majd Sakr, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA
