New grant will support efforts to level the coding playing field

By Mark Muckenfuss

Judith Canner may be data science’s Jane Goodall. 

Goodall is world famous for her work observing and documenting the behavior and social interactions of chimpanzees in the wilds of Africa. 

Canner, a Cal State Monterey Bay professor and acting chair of the Mathematics and Statistics department, won’t be venturing beyond California. But a new $370,000 National Science Foundation grant will allow her to record and observe the social behavior of students in the classroom with an eye on improving equity for women and minority groups and teaching students how to work cooperatively. 

“Being told to work together, doesn’t mean they know how to work together,” Canner said of students. “We think if we just put students in groups they’ll know how to work together and they usually don’t. We have to teach them how to do that. It’s a really big thing.”

She is collaborating with Allison Theobold, an assistant professor of statistics at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Students at that university will also be studied.

Canner and Theobold will focus on students coding in data science classes, an environment that typically has a disproportionate number of white male students. They will focus on techniques for integrating minorities and female students into the learning dynamic.

“More programs are introducing data science early in the curriculum,” Canner said. “Women and people of color have often been excluded from those spaces.”

Very often, when they do enter such spaces, they encounter a dynamic that sidelines them from active learning. Typically, Canner said, a student who is more knowledgeable will take charge and do the work while others are left to look on. Or, in other cases, the student with more knowledge will direct other students on how to do the work but not explain the “why” behind it. In either case, the authority of one student excludes the other student from the learning process.

Canner said that if students feel they don’t belong in a classroom, they’re likely to feel they don’t belong in a career that incorporates that type of knowledge and exclude themselves from such a career. With data science being integrated into more and more career paths, it is important that students not feel that rejection, she said.

“It doesn’t matter if we think they belong, it matters if the students think they belong,” she said. “To exclude students right away is not going to benefit our workforce.”

The study will utilize video data of students interacting in the classroom. The researchers will evaluate those interactions and formulate strategies for increasing the engagement and cooperation of students with a specific focus on managing the power dynamics of the student interactions.

“We’ll be collecting a large amount of data,” Canner said. ”We will identify the interactions and conduct surveys and evaluations of the students and measure their understanding. We’ll be bringing on a whole team of student researchers to help us evaluate and analyze that data. Those students will come with us to conferences to present the findings.”

She sees potential for the techniques that will be developed to apply not just to data science.

“This first year is a pilot phase,” Canner said. “Next year will be a full implementation phase. In the third year, we take our findings and developed practices to other classes and we’ll be training faculty to implement these new strategies in their classrooms, refining those practices to make sure that what we’ve developed applies to any classroom that incorporates data science and programming. Even though we’re developing it in the context of data science we hope it can go beyond and be used in any classroom.” 

And, because two different school environments are being analyzed, there is greater potential for discovering widespread applications. 

“That’s what makes this grant unique,” Canner said. “We have two public universities with very different demographics. We’ll be testing and developing pedagogical practices with thorough research and evaluation. We can determine if they work in different environments.”
If they do, more students will benefit. That is the bottom line, she said. 

“We want students to develop a sense of belonging,” she said, “and to feel that they make a difference.”