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.