From our surveys, interviews, and observations with over 60 culturally and linguistically diverse girls, we found that despite high baseline reports of confidence in learning CS (72%) among BRIGHT-CS participants, observations of students showed early signs of low efficacy in learning CS, such as avoiding challenges or reluctance to ask questions or make mistakes for fear of social judgment. In interviews, some students believed that making mistakes or experiencing challenges was evidence of not being “good at” computer science and STEM in general.
Data from BRIGHT-CS instructors, mentors, and school sponsors suggest that these feelings of low efficacy may be tied to implicit messaging from the broader school and cultural environment that culturally and linguistically diverse students do not bring value to the pursuit of knowledge or solutions in STEM+CS disciplines and only bring deficits to be fixed; thereby priming students for stereotype threat.
We found that the BRIGHT-CS learning ecosystem shows promise for:
- reversing the effects of negative messages regarding student efficacy through implicit counter-messaging from BRIGHT-CS instructors and mentors;
- encouraging students to commit effort towards STEM+CS through explicit messaging about the value of mistakes/challenges from same-group members; and
- moving students from naïve confidence to authentic self-efficacy in learning CS.
By the end of the first year of implementation, student reflections showed themes of satisfaction with “figuring out”/“fixing” a problem, pride in making a working technology product from top to bottom and having improved or planning to improve on past performance.
