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UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

Surprising possibilities imagined and realized through information technology: Encouraging high school girls’ interests in information technology (Forssen et al. 2011)

  • Findings

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Citation

Forssen, A., Lauriski-Karriker, T., Harriger, A., & Moskal, B. (2011). Surprising possibilities imagined and realized through information technology: Encouraging high school girls’ interests in information technology. Journal of STEM Education: Innovations and Research, 12(5-6), 46-57.

Highlights

    • The study examined the overall and gender-specific impact of the Surprising Possibilities Imagined and Realized through Information Technology (SPIRIT) program on high school students’ attitudes toward information technology (IT), with special focus on increasing female students’ confidence and abilities in using technology. The SPIRIT program, which took place during two weeks in summer 2009 at a large Midwestern university, had female and male students use a three-dimensional programming environment called Alice to create animations for storytelling. Participants also completed other hands-on activities and heard presentations from professionals on the use of IT in their jobs.
    • The authors administered 20-item baseline and follow-up surveys to students on general attitudes toward and gender stereotypes in IT and compared responses before and after the SPIRIT program. Of the76 students who attended the program, 74 participated in the study. Because the program aimed to increase girls’ interests in IT, the study sample was 70 percent female.
    • The study found that, after attending the SPIRIT program, female students demonstrated no change in general attitudes toward IT, but showed a significant reduction in believing the gender stereotype that women do not perform as well as men in IT.
    • In looking at emergent themes of open-ended survey responses, the authors found that women’s attitudes toward the characteristics of a person with a career in IT changed from a focus on the person’s skills or intelligence before participation in SPIRIT to a more diverse description of characteristics after participation in the program. Similarly, female students provided a more expansive set of example IT careers after participation in SPIRIT. The authors did not conduct statistical tests on these differences.

Reviewed by CLEAR

May 2016

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