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PROGRAMS
NC-MSEN
Pre-College Program

The NC-MSEN PreCollege
Program
enrolls 450 middle grades and high school
students in year-round enrichment activities. The
mission of this program is to keep
underrepresented students on a college-bound
track leading to Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics careers.
North Carolina
Middle Mathematics Project (NCM2)
The North Carolina Middle
Mathematics Project (NCM2) is a state-wide
professional leadership development project for
middle school mathematics teachers. The project
is a collaboration between the North Carolina
Mathematics and Science Education Network
(NC-MSEN)
and the North Carolina Department of
Public Instruction (NCDPI). The major goals of the
project are two-fold: to improve mathematics
education in grades 6 through 8 across the state
of North Carolina, and to retain and support
teachers in their professional development. Each
of the participating NC-MSEN centers has created
a team of university mathematicians and
educators, school district administrators, and
middle school mathematics teachers (NCM2 Lead
Teachers) to carry out the goals of the project.
NCM2 has created
three graduate-level courses for middle-school
mathematics teachers focusing on the content
areas of statistics and data analysis, geometry
and measurement, and number algebra. University
faculty offered these courses to Lead Teachers
during the summer and fall of 2002.
In the following
year, these courses were offered to approximately
115 teachers throughout the state by university
faculty and NCM2 lead Teachers. Teachers are
using this coursework in the pursuit of National Board
Certification in Early Adolescence/Mathematics.
The courses are also being used as the foundation
for obtaining master's degrees in middleschool
mathematics education for teachers in the
project.
NCM2 project participants
have been active in assisting the NCDPI and
participating in statewide leadership activities.
The project is continuing during 2004-05.
NC State's NCM2
Leadership Team
- Dr. Sarah
Berenson, Professor and NC State CRMSE
Director, NC State
University
- Dr.
Hollylynne Stohl, Assistant Professor, NC State
University
- Gemma
Mojica, Lead Teacher/Graduate student, NC State
University
- Karen
Russell, Lead Teacher, Centennial Middle
School
Girls On Track
(GoT)
Girls On Track (GoT) is a summer program for
middle grade girls, encouraging them to study
mathematics through high school and into college.
Girls investigate community problems using
computer technologies, engage in Sports Algebra,
and other enrichment activities to keep up their
interests in math and science and expand their
career horizons.
Female college
students continue to avoid math related careers
such as computer science, engineering, and
physics- women today make up only 29% of IT
careers. According to several studies, girls
begin to lose interest in math and science after
enter middle school; this is credited to later
occupational discrepancies.
GoT was created
to combat and study this decrease in interest. A
collaboration between NC State's Center for Research in
Mathematics and Science Education, Computer Science Department, and Meredith College, the two-week summer
program aims to instruct and interest girls with
hands-on activities and explorations while
studying how such factors as proportional
reasoning later impact their later scholarly
careers.
Girls on Track
is sponsored by NC State University, Meredith College, Wake County Public Schools, and the State Department of Public
Instruction. The project is partially funded
by the National Science Science
Foundation and IBM.
WOMEN and
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (WIT): A Comparative Study
of Young Women from Middle Grades through High
School and into College
Women and Information
Technology: A Comparative Study of Young
Women from Middle Grades through High School, and
into College (WIT) is a research study to address
the current low participation of young women in
IT careers. We propose to develop and test a
model of the factors associated with young
women's decisions to persist in advanced
mathematics and computer science courses so as to
prepare themselves for, and succeed in,
undergraduate study in information technology
[IT]. IT careers are defined as those requiring
an electrical engineering, computer science, or
computer engineering degree. The goal of WIT
project is to develop and test a model of
educational persistence leading to successful
undergraduate study in IT careers among young
women. The project's objectives are:
- a) Identify
school, social, and personal factors
associated with young women's decisions
to pursue and persist in undergraduate
study in IT fields,
- b) Create
and test a model using these factors to
predict young women's decisions to pursue
and persist in IT undergraduate study,
- c)
Disseminate the results of this study in
professional publications, professional
meetings, advisory board meetings, and in
an electronic monograph to scholars,
teachers, policy makers, parents, and
girls, and
- d) Propose
appropriate interventions to increase
young women's interest in IT careers
based on the WIT model.
We propose to
examine success factors rather than failure
factors in order to make a significant
contribution to the research on gender and
information technology.
Agile Software
Development
Agile Software Development has emerged in recent
years and is rapidly gaining in popularity and
use. Agile methodologies are highly collaborative
and social in nature. We believe the
collaboration and the social component inherent
in these methodologies is appealing to people
whose learning and training models are socially
oriented. There is evidence that some minority
groups, some disabled, and in general a fair
fraction of women and men may be helped by this
approach to IT education and careers.
Changes in the
organization of work often have consequences for
recruiting and retaining employees. The
transition from solo programming to the more
collaborative work IT styles may make a career in
IT more attractive to people who may have
concerns regarding the lack of social interaction
in many IT positions. Additionally, the agile
practice has the potential of enabling
physically- and learning- disabled IT workers.
We propose a
multi-disciplinary, synergistic research between
the Computer Science, the Electrical and Computer
Engineering, and the Mathematics, Science, and
Technology Education departments at North
Carolina State University NCSU). Additionally,
NCSU partners with Meredith College (an all-women
college) and the North Carolina A&T (a
historically black university) to study and
demonstrate the potential in these environments.
We will measure the success rate of students who
learn in collaborative, agile settings; we will
test hypotheses concerning the impact of
collaborative practices on the issues such as the
under-representation of women and minorities in
IT, and the enabling of disabled workers; and we
will also assess and compare each of these
techniques in terms of the effort expended and
returns in terms of student retention in the
educational and training pipeline, and the
quality of the resulting software.
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