Our research project attracted considerable support and enthusiasm from diverse organisations in government, the education community and industry, demonstrating widespread recognition of the importance of engaging girls more effectively with IT and of raising their career aspirations.
The Victorian ICT for Women Network [Vic. ICT] provided both monetary funding and in-kind support, including the time of senior women on its board, access to members, and administrative support. The Australian Computer Society [ACS] also provided funding and in-kind support, including the time of one woman with web expertise who worked with the researchers and assisted in the development and support of the internet portal.
The Victorian Government Department of Education and Early Childhood Development [DEECD] contributed funds and in-kind support, providing access to teachers, schools, and school facilities to run the program. Further, DEECD provided an education specialist to support the program. She worked with the researchers, and assisted with gaining access to schools and teachers. Netspace, an internet service provider, provided in-kind sponsorship for the participating DEECD schools for extra bandwidth to connect with the internet portal for the 36 months of the project. One secondary college where the first iteration of the program was trialled also contributed funds to the program that the research team used to provide additional support to the PhD student who was attached to the project (see Chapter 8).
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Conclusion
The lack of women in the IT industry is a complex issue. The earlier research that informed the development and implementation of the Digital Divas program helped us understand how to design teaching materials and establish classroom practices that would engage girls to think and work positively with IT and to build links between IT uses and future careers in the industry. The program made a significant contribution to addressing the issues faced by young girls early in the IT pipeline.
There have been a variety of approaches taken in the past to encourage more girls to study IT and consider working in the industry. The general lack of success of these programs is indicated by the decrease in the numbers of females studying IT and employed in the industry. The question that motivated us was ‘What can be done to make a difference?’ We believe that the research findings from the Digital Divas program that we report in this book support the contention that good IT programs need to be embedded in the school curriculum rather than being dependent upon individual teachers’
enthusiasm (Fisher, et al., 2007). In addition, we are convinced that a lasting and strategic cultural change is more likely to result if initiatives are targeted early in the education pipeline.
The most tangible outcome of our research study has been to establish a sustainable IT program available for interested teachers to use with girls Australia-wide and internationally. Digital Divas has the potential to improve girls’ educational outcomes by positively enhancing their attitudes to IT, and stimulating and expanding their career aspirations to include IT.
In the longer term, the viability of the IT industry will be strengthened.
In writing this book we are cognisant that our primary audience for this text is the academic community. Others likely to be interested in the book will be those planning to implement a similar program. Schools and teachers may also be our audience, but to a lesser extent. The structure of the book following this introductory chapter is as follows:
Chapter 2 presents our stance on the importance of evaluation in design-ing intervention projects, and in particular the theoretical underpinndesign-ings that guided the development of the instruments used to undertake the evaluation. It is our understanding that few previous intervention programs, with similar goals to ours, had adopted such rigorous evaluation processes.
Chapter 3 provides detail on how the research was conducted, including the research methods and analysis used. The rationale for selecting the research methods we have used is presented, as well as justification from the
literature for these approaches. Our research collected both qualitative and quantitative data and we present information on the software packages used to analyse our data as well as the tests applied to the data. We used a mixed-methods approach and are confident that this provided a valid and reliable set of results from which our conclusions were drawn.
Chapter 4 presents an overview of the schools involved in the Digital Divas program and a description of the portal designed to hold the materials and support classroom activities. The chapter highlights the diversity of schools that participated in the program, from the perspective of the socio-economic make-up of each. This chapter also reports on post-school outcomes within their cohort and the number of times data was gathered from each school. The chapter concludes with evidence of the ongoing influence of our program, which is still available online and being used in 2015.
Chapter 5 describes and discusses the three spheres of influence we identified as important in implementing a program that sought to change girls’ perceptions of IT. The chapter provides an insight into our design, and also presents some evidence within the framework of the three spheres of influence that shows how the Digital Divas program did indeed put IT on the spectrum of these students’ future career choices.
Chapter 6 reports specifically on the extent to which we have been able to change the perception girls have of IT. A primary focus is to report on the findings against the assumptions we made at the start when the program was designed (described in Chapter 2). We present data to address our assumptions and also reflect on what has worked and what has not worked based on this data.
Chapter 7 explores the wider impact of the program. Our experience has been that Digital Divas has had an impact beyond the girls it was designed to influence. There was an impact on the schools, the teachers, the curriculum and the school role models, our Expert Divas. The ripple effect of the Digital Divas program is presented in Figure 7.1. The chapter draws again on both the qualitative and quantitative data as well as observations of the researchers.
Chapter 8 is an invited chapter to the book, authored by the PhD student in the program. Her research focused on the influence of the Digital Divas program on the wider school community: that is the teachers of other classes; the other students in each of the year levels; and the parents of these children. The data gathered focused on two specific schools in the program.
There were three key findings to this doctoral research: first, that attitudes to IT in the wider community are influential in the success or otherwise
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of intervention programs such as Digital Divas; second, there was no clear pattern of change in attitude in the direction desired by the program creators; and third, several unanticipated factors affected the success of the program in these schools. This wider research project clearly shows that the socio-cultural make-up of the school and the parents influenced the desired impact of the program.
Chapter 9 is the final chapter and includes our reflections on the journey we have been through in establishing Digital Divas. The chapter brings to-gether what we have learnt so that others might benefit from our experience, in particular the importance and value of developing an evaluation frame-work; the value of an extended program to effect change; and the need to work closely schools, teachers, parents, and Expert Divas. It presents what worked and what was less successful in terms of the data-gathering process, and what we would do differently next time.