The NC State Computer Science Department had doubled undergraduate enrollments and the percentage of women in our program between 2010 and 2020. With this growth, we are challenged with understanding persistence and retention of our students, particularly women. The goal of the diagnostic grant program is to collect and analyze demographic data to better understand where our students are coming from, and if they leave the program, where do they go. The results of the data analysis will provide insights into how we can better support our students to increase persistence, retention, and success.

The Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP) is a group-based, dual-mentored research structure designed to provide a supportive and inclusive research experience using equity-based practices to grow the confidence and foundational skills of early-career students, particularly African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and women. For this NSF subaward from UC San Diego, we plan to add ERSP to our course catalog and start implementing it in Fall 2021. As part of their full-year apprenticeship, teams of students will learn about graduate school, be matched to research mentors, observe the mentor's lab, participate in the ERSP course, and propose an independent research project.

Existing research suggests that institutions may be able to increase the persistence of women in STEM by increasing their self-assessed STEM ability. We propose conducting both a longitudinal field experiment (in Computer Science [CS] classes) and a lab experiment (with novice programmers) to assess the impact of unambiguous, direct performance feedback on women������������������s and men������������������s self-assessed CS ability and CS persistence. Beyond the support for our research provided by social-psychological theory, mediation analysis of pilot data from a field experiment found the predicted causal chain: the intervention increased women������������������s self-assessed CS ability, which then increased women������������������s CS persistence intentions.

Demand for computing is increasing across pathways; majors, minors, and computing in discipline. Peer teachers are critically needed to support student learning outcomes. This proposal builds on an existing NIC in peer teaching to expand support across computing pathways. We will assess the impact of peer teaching, particularly related to support with debugging, on 1) departmental and non-major course culture, student learning and support and 2) broadening participation of underrepresented groups in computing courses and as peer teachers. We will share our results and build a larger community through a 2nd offering of the Peer Teaching Summit.

The proposed work is essentially a bridge effort. The goal is to advance the work that was performed in the previous instructional grant, in preparation for an NSF grant that will broaden the impact of our work. The primary objective is to develop a design tool that can be used with each of the five CAD apps and support further instructional software testing and assessment. Currently, when using any one of the apps, the user selects nodes, connects them to create a structure, applies boundary conditions, then applies loads, and finally runs the program after which results are displayed in different forms (movies, static drawings, tabular������������������data, pop���������������ups, etc). The user essentially runs one case.���������

This grant aims to close the gap in the ?design thread? found in AE and ME undergraduate programs by developing general-purpose, course-specific CAD apps for its core courses in the freshman and sophomore years ? Engineering Statics, Engineering Dynamics, Solid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, and Vibrations.