8/14/2019 0 Comments HousekeepingToday I continued to work on my survey drafts. I plan on sending them to my advisors soon, so I can finalize them and have them ready to be put into the actual survey platforms. Other than that, I've sent out some emails to Ms. Wilson and others to see if I could get some data on who is in what classes at Severn, gender and age-wise. I'm confident this data will really help with the study because it'll be pretty raw: these types of people are in these types of classes and so on. My last move is to talk to Mr. Lagarde about the possibility of sending the surveys to other high schools in the area. I haven't reached out to him yet, and I've been thinking about talking with my advisors before I do so just to make sure I have everything put together. As the end of the summer gets closer, I'm confident in the research and the work that I've done that'll help me get right into things at school. Since a lot of my project is based off of Severn data from the surveys and the class lists, it was difficult to do a lot this summer, but I think I've done the most I could with the room I had.
- Julia
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7/29/2019 0 Comments Drafting SurveysToday I began actually drafting the surveys. Right now, I have drafts of four different surveys that I plan to give to the Lower, Middle, and Upper school of Severn, as well as one for other high schools in Anne Arundel County. Writing the questions were not as difficult as I imagined them to be, but I know that I need to take a lot of time to go back and make sure that they are as concise and unbiased as possible. I also am worried that not many people will actually want to take the surveys, so I need to make them short and sweet as well. My last concern is that I may not be able to send the survey to other schools. For that to happen, I need to talk to Mr. Lagarde, which is my next step. I'm confident in my ability to conduct the surveys in just the Severn community, but I firmly believe that if I had outside data to compare Severn to, I would have more concise data and would be able to have the right perspective for when I write my final report and ideas for improvement.
- Julia 7/19/2019 0 Comments Surveymonkey or google forms?Before I spent a lot of time on drafting my surveys, I wanted to figure out what my boundaries were in terms of survey length and question type. This meant that I had to choose a survey platform to base my project on. I was stuck between SurveyMonkey and Google Forms, since I am most comfortable with those two platforms, but both had pros and cons that I needed to address. Luckily, I actually found an article that compared the two and was able to come up with some points on either side and compare them with my own findings. Google Forms is, for the most part, free, but is lacking in question diversity and features. SurveyMonkey is pretty expensive, but is more compatible with large-scale surveys and different types of audiences. Though I'm leaning toward SurveyMonkey, I think that I am going to draft a few of my surveys and see which platform is a better fit.
- Julia 6/25/2019 0 Comments Beginning the surveysAs I continue to build my knowledge of girls and women in STEM, I decided that I should take the time to start writing the drafts of my surveys. Before I began actually writing the questions, I spent today researching what makes an effective survey, and more importantly how to write unbiased questions. I found a few good-looking blogs that outlined some key guidelines when writing surveys and how to write questions that will receive the most concise answers. Simple wordings and structures of questions can completely change the response of an audience. As an example, "How satisfied are you with our product?" will most likely receive positively-biased responses compared to "What is your satisfaction with our product on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest rate of satisfaction and 5 being the highest?" which is more neutral. Writing the surveys will be more difficult than I originally thought because I need to put a lot of time and care into crafting unbiased questions. I also need to make them really concise and short because it will be difficult to keep the attention of enough kids to get real results, especially from the younger middle schoolers and elementary school kids.
- Julia I spent this round of research figuring out the most women-heavy job fields, since my previous findings suggested that it wasn't anything STEM-related. What I found was that the most popular areas were all services and required significant human contact, such as child care services, home health care services, veterinary services, social services, and primary and secondary school education. None of these surprised me that much, but I was still confused as to why women prefer jobs like these instead of laboratory and studio jobs, like engineering and chemistry. I dug a bit deeper and found a psychology article that discussed "helping," and it went on to basically say that men prefer to help in heroic fashions while women tend to try to be more nurturing and caring. I'm excited to read more of this article, because I think that understanding the psychology behind women's choices to not pursue STEM might help create reasons for women to pursue it.
- Julia 6/19/2019 2 Comments First stepsMost of my summer work will be research and the development of my surveys, since my project is based around the Severn community, so I decided to start digging into the hard facts about women in STEM. I started with looking for simple percentages of women in specific fields, but I quickly realized that many sources gave different values for the same subject. Luckily, I only needed this data as background knowledge to compare Severn with, so I just averaged the numbers from the most reliable sources. None of the data I found was very surprising to me, other than the fact that women receive just over 50% of all bachelor of science and engineering degrees. As I looked closer into this number, I found that out of every recipient, male or female, less than 20% of the computer science and engineering recipients were women. Women do, however, make up 62% of the social science field and 48% of the environmental science field, which makes more sense to me. Of course, I needed to understand why the numbers fluctuate based on the subject, and I found statistics that illustrated the reasons why people do not pursue STEM following high school. Less than 1% of responders to a survey said that they faced gender discrimination and 20% said that they took interest in another subject. When I continue my research, I'll try to figure out what other people choose to major in in college and which work fields are most popular to try and see if a trend can offer an answer to why women are not as represented in STEM fields as a whole.
- Julia |
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