How Early Does the CS gender Gap Emerge? A Study of Collaborative Problem Solving in 5th Grade Computer Science
In this episode I unpack Tsan, Boyer, and Lynch’s (2016) publication titled “How early does the CS gender gap emerge? A study of collaborative problem solving in 5th grade computer science,” which investigates the potential impact of gendered groups on the quality of completed Scratch projects in an in-school computer science class for 5th grade students.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each week of this podcast alternates
between an interview and an unpacking
scholarship where talk about some
research in relation to cs education
this week's particular episode
is a continuation of a discussion on
gender related
publications that are relevant to cs
educators in particular this week's
episode
is unpacking the paper titled how early
does the cs gender gap emerge
a study of collaborative problem solving
in fifth grade computer science
this paper was written by jennifer sun
christie elizabeth boyer
and colin f lynch apologies if i
mispronounce any names
as always you can find links to this
particular paper in the show notes by
clicking on the article
title or you can find more publications
by other authors
by clicking on their names and it'll
take you to their google scholar profile
alright so here's the abstract for this
particular paper quote
elementary computer science has gained
increasing attention with the computer
science education research community
we have only recently begun to explore
the many unanswered questions about how
young students learn computer science
how they interact with each other and
how their skill levels and backgrounds
vary
one set of unanswered questions focuses
on gender equality for young computer
science educators
this paper examines how the gender
composition of collaborative groups in
elementary computer science relates to
student achievement
we report on data collected from an
in-school 5th grade computer science
elective
offered over four quarters in 2014-2015
we found a significant difference in the
quality of artifacts produced by learner
groups
depending on their gender composition
with groups of all female students
performing significantly lower than
other groups
our analyses suggest important factors
that are influential as these learners
begin to solve computer science problems
this new evidence of gender disparities
in computer science achievements
as young as 10 years of age highlights
the importance of future studies on
these factors in order to provide
effective
equitable computer science education to
learners of all ages end quote
now if i were to summarize this
particular study into a single sentence
i would say that this paper investigates
the potential impact of gendered groups
on the quality of
completed scratch projects in an
in-school computer science class for 5th
grade students
all right so in the introduction of this
paper the authors describe
how there's a difference in gender
within like
post-secondary high school and even
middle school classes however there was
very little research at the time of this
publication
on the gender differences in elementary
school the authors note
that in particular math has shown some
gender differences as young as first
grade
so considering that there are some
differences in that grade level or age
group
the authors are going to investigate
whether or not there are some
gender differences within fifth grade
students now before actually doing this
particular study they did a pilot group
with an after school class
and they co-developed this class with an
elementary school teacher and then after
completing this pilot and doing some
revisions and whatnot they then
implemented this class across
four different quarters which i'll talk
a little bit more about so this
particular paper is guided by the
question
how is gender composition of
collaborative groups in elementary
computer science related to student
achievement
that question's from page 388 and here's
a
two sentence summary of the findings
quote we collected students as programs
from one project in the fifth grade
computer science course these programs
were rated for quality
and the results showed that all female
groups produced significantly lower
scored artifacts than groups with at
least one male
end quote from page 389 okay so the next
section of the paper talks about some
related work so they highlight some
areas of elementary school
interventions such as like using other
platforms
or computer science as well as some
discussions around collaboration in
elementary school
now under that particular section on
collaboration elementary school there's
an interesting quote from page 389
quote outside of computer science a
study of elementary students is
collaboration revealed that female to
male relationships
in subjects such as physical education
reading language art
social studies and art are not equal
boys appear to benefit more from female
to male pairings by developing their
leadership skills and increasing their
self-efficacy in problem solving
whereas these pairings can reinforce
gender stereotypes for girls
end quote so that is a very interesting
finding if you are engaging
in paired programming you'll likely want
to read some more research on this
finding and to figure out why
is it that this kind of pairing might be
beneficial for male students but
detrimental to female students maybe
i'll find some particular papers to
discuss this
in future unpacking scholarship episodes
all right so the next section of the
paper talks about some context so the
teacher who was doing this had no
formal background in computer science
and the class set this was occurring in
was a 30-day 45-minute class time
that occurred in a quarterly rotation
so new students would appear every
quarter the demographics were 53.1
percent african-american 32.6 caucasian
and 14.3
hispanic latino native american asian or
mixed race
and 47.4 percent of students receive
free or reduced lunch
so those stats are on page 390 those
were basically a verbatim
restatement of them now in this school
year throughout each of the quarters
there were a total of 55 students
in this elective class 16 of which were
girls and 39 of which were boys there
was no mention of non-binary so i
actually don't know
whether or not they investigated whether
there were non-binary individuals in
this class
or at least people who identified as
non-binary at the time because if you
would ask me when i was this age group i
would have identified as male but
it wasn't until a few years ago i was
able to finally find some
language that described how i actually
feel and identify
as a non-binary individual so in this
class these students completed three
major projects two of them were scratch
programming projects and one was a
research project
on computer science and society so this
particular study
looked at the first programming project
so this particular project was to create
a fairy tale
in scratch the students were required to
incorporate two instances of cause and
effect from the fairy tale
and two instances of user input where
the user's input decided the path the
story took
in quote from page 390. all right so the
next section of this particular paper
takes a look at 18 pairs of groups
four were all female four were male and
female pairings
and then 10 were all male then there's
also one individual
who didn't work with a group now you'll
already notice that there is a
quite a gender imbalance in this so the
results are going to obviously be a bit
skewed
in terms of having a much smaller sample
size of females
students and a much larger sample size
of male students but as with all studies
that are like this
follow-up studies are important to
figure out is this generalizable
and if so where and how and why all
right so in this particular
study the things that they're analyzing
with the projects themselves
were looking at the requirements like
whether or not they actually
had two instances of user input and
cause and effect
they also looked at the consistency so
whether the project actually ran
consistently so like resetting the
sprites
if if needed at the start of the project
and then usability so whether there were
some prompts to like guide the user to
figure out how to
engage with this story so they did
weight this so that
towards the requirements
consistency and then 10
was going towards the usability now
here's a quote from page 390 that kind
of summarizes the overall results
quote the programs of all four
all-female groups
scored below the median and the scores
were clustered together
the scores of the female male groups
were also relatively close to each other
with their lowest scores being equal to
the highest score of the all female
groups and their highest score being
slightly lower than most of the all male
groups
the all male groups displayed the widest
range of scores with both the highest
and lowest scoring groups
out of all the categories however note
that the all male group was also
the largest with an n of 10. seventy
percent of the all male groups scored
zero point seven seven or higher end
quote
and to clarify the maximum score you
could receive is a one so
in other words seventy percent of all
the male groups scored at least 77
percent or higher
out of the total possible score so on
the next page on 390 here's a following
quote
quote the results revealed that none of
the all female groups and 64
of the at least one male groups achieved
a high code score
the difference was statistically
significant with a p-value of 0.04
we also examined the all-male group n of
and at least one female and of eight
groups separately in the split seventy
percent of all male groups and
twenty-five percent of at least one
female group achieved high code scores
and this difference was not
statistically significant the p-value of
they give a few examples of case studies
so the first one that they give is of an
individual and they point out that this
particular individual
scored the highest possible score and
that they had
experience participating in the after
school pilot program that occurred
in the spring before this school year
the next case study that
they talk about is a female to male pair
and they found that there were some
interpersonal collaboration and
communication issues
that kind of negatively impacted the
overall process
the next case study that they talk about
is a female to female pair
and how they had good interpersonal
communication and collaboration because
they were friends
and although their code did run
consistently and they did have some user
prompts
the actual conversations were incoherent
so the
fairy tale didn't really make sense
according to the people who
assessed this and the last group that
they provide a case study for is a male
to male pairing
and although they worked well together
they were kind of distracted by looking
at other projects
and they scored low compared to the
other all-male groups all right so the
next section of this particular paper is
on the discussions and the limitations
so the first section talks about
supporting design and planning so
they're basically saying that
this process could go a lot better for
partner groups and for just creating in
general
by engaging in some supportive processes
for learning how to design
and plan for creating a project so for
example in your class you might engage
in storyboarding or
pseudocoding or you write out a rough
outline or framework for what you want
to happen and how it will happen
with some of the code that you could use
in whatever platform you're using
or language this is especially important
for
large projects or even some smaller
projects if kids are
less familiar with programming so the
next section
under the discussion is on fostering
collaborative skills and practices
and they were discussing how it's
important to try and identify some good
collaborative
habits with the students and how these
collaborative skills can be not only
beneficial
for the projects that are being created
in the computer science class but also
just
in life in general in career or leisure
the next section that they talk about is
investigating cognitive and social
constructs so i'm going to read a quote
from here because this is important to
consider this from page 392.
quote differences in performance at
young ages is almost certainly related
in part to influences that occur prior
to the class itself for example
there is a systematic gender difference
between toys marketed to young children
legos and robots are more likely to be
marketed for boys
while dolls and kitchen sets are more
likely to be marketed for girls
it is possible that the traditionally
boy toys foster spatial and programmatic
reasoning skills
more than the traditionally girl toys
and recent literature suggests a
correlation between spatial reasoning
and computer science performance
in quote and the boy toys and girl toys
were in quotes so this really relates to
what i talked about two weeks ago in
that unpacking scholarship episode
where i talk about how technology
positions and careers
in malaysia are dominated by women
statistically speaking
so if you haven't listened to that
episode or the other episodes related to
gender i highly recommend
checking those out i'll include links to
those in the show notes all right and
then this
particular section of the paper finishes
with the discussion on some of the
limitations i'm going to skip those but
basically it's talking about small
sample size
how the course changed over each one of
the quarters so you can't really compare
quarter one to quarter four
because the teacher was continuing to
refine and improve et cetera
all right so the paper concludes with
the discussion on feature work
and here's a quote from page 393 quote
classroom observations suggested that a
difference did exist and results
demonstrated that all female groups
achieves
significantly lower program quality than
groups with at least one male
analyses suggest that numerous factors
play important roles
including the extent to which students
were willing to engage in design
students as collaborative practices and
other cognitive and social factors
end quote so this quote kind of leads
into what i'd like to talk about next
which are some of my lingering questions
or thoughts on this particular paper so
one question that i have is how might
the gender and confidence of a teacher
impact learning so as an example if a
female teacher
expressed that they didn't know much
because it was their first time
doing programming or coding would it
negatively impact female students's
own perceptions of how they might be
able to do in coding
or computer science however if the
teacher is female and they
express confidence would that have
increased any of the confidence in the
female students
and how would this change for male
teachers or non-binary or trans teachers
in other words what is the impact or
potential impact that a teacher might
have in relation to their self-efficacy
or confidence
with coding and teaching coding so if i
was in the classroom and i was
expressing some hesitation about
doing something or learning something or
teaching something students
related to my different identities may
have
also expressed some hesitation or been
like well if jared can't do it then i
don't know if i can do it but i don't
know now the question that i have is how
would the findings have
changed over time so the authors do
mention that they analyze the first
project but what would happen if you
compare the first with the last project
will there be any differences in amount
of growth or in final product quality
so for example if the female and female
groups were scoring the lowest on the
first project did they make the highest
gains in terms of overall score
on their final project or did they
remain at the same
overall scoring or just scale with a
relative amount
of increase as the other groups
also how might the findings have changed
if the groups had improved their
collaboration skills
the authors do mention that multiple
groups didn't do so well
and it might have been because they
weren't really great at collaborating
and working with each other
so one thing we might need to consider
ses educators this is not just about
learning the content
but it's also all about being able to
facilitate collaboration
with other students and learning from
and working with peers
another question that i have is how
might the results change if we accounted
for prior experience
so for example accounting for prior
experience with computers
prior experience with creating stories
prior experience playing video games
prior experience coding like one of the
case studies one of the students was
engaging in the pilot program that was
after school
or even just experience going home and
being able to actually
continue to work on the project at home
since scratch is online
how might all of these factors impact
the overall quality of the final product
and what is missing from
the final product that could be learned
by actually chatting with the students
like oh what didn't you include and why
in other research that i read
some of the researchers have mentioned
that the final product was poor
but it was because students ultimately
ended up throwing away much of the work
rather than leaving it in their project
so they may have scored a higher score
if they had kept it in but they
ultimately didn't like it so they just
removed it which gave the false
impression that they didn't understand
what they were supposed to do or were
incapable of doing it or really they
were they just didn't like the overall
end product
so they essentially erased their work
the final question that i have is
how would the results change for trans
students so for example would we find
similar results for trans masculine
students and males
and what about trans feminine students
and females what about
non-binary non-conforming genderqueer
etc
folks who kind of who exist outside of
leaning towards
one of the binaries that is often
presented with gender so to be more
concrete with what i'm saying
if you had a female and female group a
male and male group
and a non-binary and non-binary group
and we were to take the stats of this
particular study
would the female and females go their
lowest the non-binary and non-binary
score in the middle and the male and
male score the highest
if so why obviously this is all
hypothetical but it's important to
consider it's also important to consider
that while these studies
are helpful to think through these
things we can't generalize and say
oh well because of this now i know that
my female and female pairings are just
obviously going to score lower than my
male to male pairings in the classes
that i work with no we can't make that
conclusion
but we can look at this and use it as a
heuristic and say hmm
i wonder why that is and how can i
improve upon
the pairings in my class so as an
example i personally preferred to allow
kids to determine whether they wanted to
work in groups or work on their own
i was one of those kind of students who
always preferred to work on my own even
if it meant doubling my amount of work
i just learned more that way and i
enjoyed that process
when students did want to pair with each
other i made sure that they were getting
along and that they were
both learning from this experience so
for example the
article mentions every 15 minutes like
switching between
who's the driver and who's the navigator
that can work
but some students prefer to be the
driver and some students prefer to be
the navigator as long as they can both
understand what is going on that was
fine with me and for me i also
encouraged groups that were larger than
just pairs as long as everybody could be
actively engaged and demonstrate they
all understand
what was going on totally cool with me
but those were just my approaches
so you might have some other approaches
all right so that concludes this week's
particular episode
in this little mini series on gender i
will certainly talk about it more in
future
interviews and unpacking scholarship
episodes but i hope this little mini
series gave you some things to consider
in relation to
gender and cs education if it did please
consider sharing one of these episodes
with somebody you know
and thank you so much for listening to
this particular episode i hope you have
a safe and wonderful week
Article
Tsan, J., Boyer, K. E., & Lynch, C. F. (2016). How early does the CS gender gap emerge? A study of collaborative problem solving in 5th grade computer science. SIGCSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, 388–393.
Abstract
“Elementary computer science has gained increasing attention within the computer science education research community. We have only recently begun to explore the many unanswered questions about how young students learn computer science, how they interact with each other, and how their skill levels and backgrounds vary. One set of unanswered questions focuses on gender equality for young computer science learners. This paper examines how the gender composition of collaborative groups in elementary computer science relates to student achievement. We report on data collected from an in-school 5th grade computer science elective offered over four quarters in 2014-2015. We found a significant difference in the quality of artifacts produced by learner groups depending upon their gender composition, with groups of all female students performing significantly lower than other groups. Our analyses suggest important factors that are influential as these learners begin to solve computer science problems. This new evidence of gender disparities in computer science achievement as young as ten years of age highlights the importance of future study of these factors in order to provide effective, equitable computer science education to learners of all ages.”
Author Keywords
K-12, elementary, gender diversity, collaboration
My One Sentence Summary
This paper investigates the potential impact of gendered groups on the quality of completed Scratch projects in an in-school computer science class for 5th grade students.
Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts
How might the gender and confidence of a teacher impact learning?
How would the findings have changed over time?
How might the results change if we accounted for prior experience?
How would the results change for trans students?
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
Other podcast episodes that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
AI4ALL, Curriculum Development, and Gender Discourse with Sarah Judd
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Broadening Gender in Computing for Transgender and Nonbinary Learners
In this episode I unpack Menier, Zarch, and Sexton’s (2021) publication titled “Broadening gender in computing for transgender and nonbinary learners,” which is a position paper problematizes the current lack of trans and nonbinary individuals in discourse around gender in CS education.
Examining Coding Skills of Five-year-old Children
In this episode I unpack Metin, Basaran, and Kalyenci’s (2023) publication titled “Examining coding skills of five-year-old children,” which investigates whether gender, parent education, or socioeconomic status has an impact on coding abilities of five-year-olds.
In this episode I unpack Tsan, Boyer, and Lynch’s (2016) publication titled “How early does the CS gender gap emerge? A study of collaborative problem solving in 5th grade computer science,” which investigates the potential impact of gendered groups on the quality of completed Scratch projects in an in-school computer science class for 5th grade students.
How to Get Started with Computer Science Education
In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.
Promoting Equity and Activism in Computer Science Education with Kim Wilkens
In this interview with Kim Wilkens, we discuss embracing failure, encouraging activism and community impact through CS and technology, supporting marginalized gender identities in CS, and much more.
Trans Voices Speak: Suggestions from Trans Educators about Working with Trans Students
In this episode I unpack Cayari et al.’s (2021) publication titled “Trans voices speak: Suggestions from trans educators about working with trans students,” which provides five suggestions from Trans educations on working with Trans students.
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