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Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) High utilizes human-centered design processes to teach high school students how to develop solutions to real-world problems within their communities. The goals of EPICS High are to utilize both principles from engineering and social entrepreneurship to engage high and middle school students as problem-solvers and spark interest in STEM careers. Recently, the Cisco corporate advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, granted Arizona State University funds to expand EPICS High to underrepresented students and study the student outcomes from participation in this innovative program. In this exploratory study we combined qualitative methods—in person observations and informal interviews—along with pre and post surveys with high school students, to answer the questions: What skills do students gain and how does their mindset about engineering entrepreneurship develop through participation in EPICS High? Research took place in Title I schools (meaning they have a high number of students from low-income families) as well as non-Title I schools. Our preliminary results show that students made gains in the following areas: their attitudes toward engineering; ability to improve upon existing ideas; incorporating stakeholders; overcoming obstacles; social responsibility; and appreciation of multiple perspectives when solving engineering problems. While males have better baseline scores for most measures, females tend to have the most growth in many of these areas. We conclude that these initial measures show positive outcomes for students participating in EPICS High, and provide questions for further research.
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Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability through Crowdsourcing: A Study of the NYC School Admission Lottery
Algorithms are used to aid decision-making for a wide range of public policy decisions. Yet, the details of the algorithmic processes and how to interact with their systems are often inadequately communicated to stakeholders, leaving them frustrated and distrusting of the outcomes of the decisions. Transparency and accountability are critical prerequisites for building trust in the results of decisions and guaranteeing fair and equitable outcomes. Unfortunately, organizations and agencies do not have strong incentives to explain and clarify their decision processes; however, stakeholders are not powerless and can strategically combine their efforts to push for more transparency. In this paper, I discuss the results and lessons learned from such an effort: a parent-led crowdsourcing campaign to increase transparency in the New York City school admission process. NYC famously uses a deferred-acceptance matching algorithm to assign students to schools, but families are given very little, and often wrong, information on the mechanisms of the system in which they have to participate. Furthermore, the odds of matching to specific schools depend on a complex set of priority rules and tie-breaking random (lottery) numbers, whose impact on the outcome is not made clear to students and their families, resulting in many “wasted choices” on students’ ranked lists and a high rate of unmatched students. Using the results of a crowdsourced survey of school application results, I was able to explain how random tie-breakers factored in the admission, adding clarity and transparency to the process. The results highlighted several issues and inefficiencies in the match and made the case for the need for more accountability and verification in the system.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2218975
- PAR ID:
- 10437955
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- FAccT '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 434 to 443
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594009
