3 key factors that can facilitate girls’ engagement with digital technology
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No.34
More and more students around the world are learning programming and robotics not just through informal education, but it is becoming part of school curricula.
This is why we are sharing with you the results of the research that examined school kids and teachers in Australia on the factors that can help or hinder girls studying digital technology.*
Their review of research, policies, and programs found 3 key factors that can facilitate female students’ engagement with digital technology:
having parents who support their children’s access to digital technology
ensuring that students are presented with engaging content and contexts in digital technology education
stopping the stereotypes around girls, gaming, and digital technology.
Now, let’s break it down one by one:
Engaging parents — Research shows that parent concerns over cyber safety can limit the amount of encouragement and access to digital technology they give to their children, particularly for young females (UNDP, 2021). This could lead to further maintaining the gender gap in tech, and be aware that WEF predicts that in the near future (10 years), 90% of all new careers will be related to digital skills.
Giving parents the skills and confidence to support their children’s access to digital technology in the home is important. If you are one of those parents, you can check out these guidelines for parents to help them support their children.
Ensuring there is engaging content and contexts — Research shows that team-based work and engaging contexts are crucial for ensuring student engagement in digital technology tasks. Using real-world issues, non-traditional contexts, and visually appealing content is important for increasing engagement in digital technology tasks for all students.
We have written about this before — the programming school in Denmark did active testing on resources and teaching setups which led to higher engagement of girls. It turns out that the answer is pretty simple — organize classes including things they already like to play with, and make sure they are not the only girl in the group.
This is also why our newsletter exists, so don’t worry, we’ll help you on this road of finding engaging content that will help your girl get to know tech through play.
Stopping stereotypes and stigma. Social stigma against females playing video games, or computing being a ‘boys’ activity’ may prevent some students, parents, or even teachers from seeing digital technology as being of educational benefit to female students (Accenture, 2016; Gil-Juárez et al., 2018, West et al., 2019).
The media and film industry reinforce this stereotype, with male actors portraying computer scientists and engineers in family films at a ratio of 14 to 1.
Identifying whether these stereotypes are endorsed by students and, if they are, challenging these stereotypes in the classroom is vital for improving young female students’ engagement with digital technology and STEM. So, keep one, too!
In short — keep opening our emails, and we’ll help you address all these issues and make technology fun for girls, too!
And, we would love it if you could share this with your friends — it helps us grow and the larger we are, the less work you have to do on your own :)
Have a good week and feel free to send us any of your questions, thoughts or comments, we always love to hear from you.
*The article was published in Teacher, written by ACER researchers Kristy Osborne and Sarah Buckley, and conducted for CSIRO.