Informal mentors and teen interest in learning computing
Last summer my lab taught almost 60 high school students web design. Some were in our university’s Upward Bound program, seeking to be the first in their family to attend college, and others were in our university’s Summer Youth program, coming from more privileged families with advanced degrees. As soon as the enrollment numbers were final, we realized we had a surprisingly diverse group of students from across the Seattle metropolitan area, all signed up to learn about computing. What could we learn from their experiences?
My colleague Katie Davis and I sat down and brainstormed ideas. I thought back to my time as a high schooler, and what shaped my perspectives on computing, and ultimately it was the people in my life: my middle-school algebra teacher, my high school computer science teacher, and my friends. Katie, with her expertise on youth identity development, framed this as interest development. After finding very little in the computing education research literature on the topic, we decided to focus on how these 60 teens interest (or disinterest) in computing had developed, especially in the context of a city bursting with jobs and learning opportunities related to computing.
We designed a study that would engage the youth we were teaching in two ways:
- Survey the teens about their interests, where they came from, and how they were related to computing.
- Teach a subset of the teens about computing, and understand how their interests shifted.
What we discovered was quite surprising.
First, most of the teens characterized their interests in computing as emerging from relationships. Teens described friends, fathers, teachers, brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, and even neighbors encouraging their learning about computing, facilitating field trips, finding them classes to take (including ours), and helping them with projects they worked on, providing feedback, instruction, and guidance.
When we looked at the data, these informal mentors appeared to be central to teens’ interests (or disinterest) in learning computing:
- Teens with informal computing mentors were twice as likely to have taken a computing course and learned a programming language.
- Teens with informal computing mentors had stronger interest in learning more about computing.
- Whereas our teens’ genders and socioeconomic status predicted little about their interest, having an informal computing mentor predicted much of the variation in interest.
The class that we taught to the Upward Bound students only reinforced these trends. I worked hard to act as an informal computing mentor to all 11 students I taught. And what we found was that students who came to the class with no informal computing mentor left the class with a significantly stronger interest in learning more about computing.
While all of these are correlations—it’s entirely possible that teens have interests in computing and therefore seek mentors, rather than mentors triggering and developing interest—whatever the cause, having a social relationships with someone that encourages and supports a teen’s learning of computing appears to be critically associated with interest in learning computing.
For some researchers, the importance of relationships is taken as given. For example Mimi Ito has long advocated for connected learning, under the premise that truly learner-centered learning leverages relationships between youth, peers, mentors, and caring adults. Our results support this premise, showing that even in contexts that lack all of the qualities of Ito’s connected learning paradigm, these connected qualities of learning are something that emerge in organically.
What does this mean for people know know computing? Think about your networks. Are their adolescents you know who you could encourage, facilitate, and support? What relationships do you already have that you could turn into mentoring relationships? We found a surprising number of parents and friends of teens, for example, who had never talked to them about computing. With even a small amount of encouragement, these teens might decide to enroll in a class at their high school.
For more detail on this research, we’ve published a peer reviewed article on at the ICER 2017 conference:
Andrew J. Ko and Katie Davis (2017). Computing Mentorship in a Software Boomtown: Relationships to Adolescent Interest and Beliefs. ACM International Computing Education Research Conference (ICER), 236–244.
We plan on continuing this work, trying to understand more deeply the nature of these informal mentoring relationships and how they promote interest in computing.
