Friday, July 8, 2016

Faculty in the University of Iowa College of Education and the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) will begin research on engaged student learning, with help from a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund three years of research.

Nick Bowman, director of the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education in the College of Education, and Alberto Segre, Gerard P. Weeg Faculty Scholar in Informatics in CLAS, spearheaded efforts to secure funding. Bowman and Segre will conduct multilevel analyses on two years of data from nearly 2,000 undergraduates in about 100 discussion sections. They hope to gain a better understanding of how first- and second-year college students best engage with computing and computational thinking.

This study is projected to lead to an increased number of computer science majors, as well as a better overall understanding of computation for all students. Additionally, it is likely have a strong impact on the representation of women in a historically male-dominated field.