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Beginning the path to a bachelor’s degree in community college has the potential to be a more cost-effective higher education option. Previous research on transfer students has focused broadly on curriculum alignment, articulation policies, and academic advising in efforts to reduce credit loss. Credit loss can significantly impact transfer students and result in unnecessary time and costs for them. Minimal research quantifies and visualizes credit loss or explains in detail how and why it occurs throughout students’ entire education trajectories. This study visualizes credit loss for bachelor’s programs seeking engineering transfer students who began at in-state community colleges using data from the sending and receiving institutions. Findings revealed that credit loss can occur throughout the entire degree pathway, including high school dual enrollment and advanced placement credits to community college credits. This work has implications for informing degree pathways and policies that promote successful transfer and degree completion.
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Using Research to Ensure Equity in a Cybersecurity Education Pathway
This poster describes how we are using research to inform the development of a cybersecurity education pathway to attract and retain students from groups that are underrepresented in computing fields. The partners include a non-profit research organization, a community-based tech workforce center, a community college, and a K-12 school district that serves predominantly Latinx students. The poster describes our goals, activities, the data we have collected, and how they are being used to create a sustainable pathway from high school to college that attracts a diversity of students. We describe our stages of research utilization, as well as the challenges that we are facing related to using research to ensure equity in the cybersecurity education pathway.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1837655
- PAR ID:
- 10191845
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Conference for Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The ongoing workforce shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity professionals coupled with the continued upward trend of cybercrime has led to an increased number of funding opportunities from the federal government to support projects focused on technical skills development. Significant emphasis is placed on academic transfer pathways and education-to-career pathways for students from K-12 to community college and beyond. Utilizing funding from multiple sources, faculty have intertwined grant project activities to increase awareness of cybersecurity careers and academic pathways, emphasizing digital forensics and incident response. The two grant projects, Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls, aimed to develop college-level curriculum and cybersecurity workshops for female high school students. Project activities were synthesized to create a summer camp for high school students based on the curriculum developed for the college programs in digital forensics and incident response. The synergy between the projects has shown an increase in female participation in the digital forensics course and helped build interest in cybersecurity careers among K-12 students.more » « less
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To both broaden and increase participation in any STEM field such as cybersecurity, we need to attract more students. Research shows that to do this, students need to be engaged with cybersecurity during middle school. There is a lack of age-appropriate and classroom-ready cybersecurity curriculum, however, and many teachers feel unprepared to teach the subject. To address this gap, the CyberMiSTS project team created a summer professional development workshop for middle school teachers that integrated a recent research-based understanding of cybersecurity into a curriculum that is accessible to both middle school students and their teachers. The project sought to encourage participation of a broad and diverse set of students in the field of cybersecurity by showing them how human relations play an important role in cybersecurity. We discuss our prior related work using branching web comics to introduce middle school students to cybersecurity concepts and careers, and the state of evidence-based research into effective approaches and methods for cybersecurity education. We identify challenges to broadening the pipeline for a truly diverse cybersecurity workforce that can meet industry’s need for cybersecurity professionals with a wide range of experience and skills. The paper introduces our approach for the teacher professional development workshop, maps how we designed the project to meet our research goals, and documents initial findings regarding what is needed to increase teacher self-efficacy about cybersecurity concepts and careers in a middle school classroom.more » « less
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The computer science (CS) for All movement has brought increasing opportunities in middle and high school, and there is a growing body of research on how to increase students' interest and knowledge. But little attention is paid to the structural factors that support or undermine student persistence in CS during the transition to college, which is where the most vulnerable students leave the pathway [1], [2]. In this paper we will describe how our researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) has built a cross-sector collaboration to align structures and supports across a local school district, community college, and Latinx youth-serving non-profit organization. This work is guided by the following research question: What factors help or hinder cross-sector collaborations from building structural supports for students to persist in Computer Information Systems (CIS)? Data include interviews of teachers and counselors, and notes from monthly RPP meetings including key stakeholders and designers of the pathway. Data analysis was guided by the absorptive capacity framework, which describes readiness to “value new information, assimilate it, and apply it in novel ways as part of organizational routines, policies and practice” [3]. The findings highlight key strategies that others can use to foster cross-sector partnerships that build sustainable, structural supports for student persistence in CS, including having a broker help translate organizational tensions and identify points of opportunities to create authentic engagement opportunities.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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