WISE & Computer Science Collaboration

This year, WISE has been excited to support the UA Department of Computer Science in understanding student persistence and retention trends, with a focus on the experiences of women and under-represented minorities.  This effort is funded by the Center forInclusive Computing at Northeastern University through the Diagnostic Grants program.  This program provides institutions with funding to support deep analysis of student data in order to understanding where computer science departments are losing or gaining students so that they can understand how women and students from under-represented racial and ethnic groups are fairing and where interventions are necessary.  Stephanie Murphy, an Assistant Research Social Scientist with WISE and the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, has been supporting data collection and analysis efforts in collaboration with Josh Levine, Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Marina Kisley, a graduate student in Computer Science.  Stephanie has leveraged her knowledgerelated to gender-equity in STEM and experience with the University of Arizona’s institutional research data warehouse to support the project.  The team has been tracking student persistence in the three-course introductory sequence that students take at UA. This allows them to assess the experience of students in the early stages of the degree in order to identify when student attrition occurs. Though the team is in the early stages of data analysis, they are identifying important trends related to student attrition in the major that will be helpful for informing efforts to boost retention going forward.