Men dominate computer science jobs. But the gender gap starts opening up long before students enter the workforce.
Solving the problem is a two-part equation: first, schools must offer computer science classes, and second, they need to be proactive in enrolling certain groups of students in those classes who traditionally haven’t taken them.
School leaders should be asking students for their input to make sure they design a computer science program that kids will want to be part of, said Anna Otto, the computer science and online learning coordinator for the Adams 12 Five Star District in the Denver metro area.
For several years, Otto, a 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From honoree, has been chasing ambitious goals to make computer science available to all students in her district and close participation gaps by gender and race/ethnicity. As part of these initiatives, she has been surveying students for the past two years to help better direct her efforts, and she shared what she has learned with Education Week. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is student feedback important?
One of the biggest challenges in computer science is diversity in enrollment. And trying to make sure that females and non-binary students and students of color see themselves in computer science and enroll in our computer science courses.
Step one is access. To get more kids participating, they need to have access to those courses. Then beyond that, how you structure the curriculum, how you’re teaching, how you’re recruiting students can impact [their participation]. So, I wanted to make sure that the curriculum that we had developed and the learning progressions were appealing to our students.
With one of my curriculum teams, we developed a survey based a lot on Code.org [resources] that we ask our [middle school] teachers to give in the first week of a term and in the last week of a term. We’re starting to get a critical mass of that data where we’re going be able to see what are the trends and patterns that we’re seeing within the student responses.
How has student feedback changed your approach?
Research shows that social engagement from family, friends, and educators, regardless of their technical expertise, is the factor most likely to encourage girls’ interest in computer science.
Are there ways that you can help build awareness of the courses you offer and their value amongst families? How might this impact enrollment? So, when we looked at [our] data school-by-school and even aggregated across all of our [middle] schools, we were seeing that students were responding that nobody encouraged them to take the class.
[Another] thing that I pulled out from the data: districtwide: 90 percent of our students agree or strongly agree with the statement, “I’m confident I can learn computer science.” So that was an increase from the same time last year when confidence levels were at 83 percent.
As for the cause, that’s hard to say. For the last two years, the professional learning I lead for our K-8 computer science teachers focused on incorporating social-emotional learning practices in the classroom to create an inclusive learning environment. I’d like to think that has helped. Of course, increased access and opportunities could lead to these results as well. If students have taken a course before, they’d hopefully be more likely to feel confident in their ability to learn computer science.
How does students’ confidence connect to enrollment gaps between genders and some races?
We know that one of the reasons that females and students of color don’t enroll in computer science is because they don’t see themselves in it. They think that they wouldn’t be good at it. As a result, they lose confidence in their own ability to do it. If they feel confident they can learn computer science, then of course they’ll be more likely to enroll in computer science.
A great example is, I probably wouldn’t go in today and take a class to learn basketball because I’m not confident in my athletic abilities. Whereas if someone built me up, maybe I would be.
In that same data set, we saw some disparity between our white students versus our Black or Hispanic students, where 90 percent of students who self-identified as white indicated they were confident they could learn computer science—agree or strongly agree. However, only 80 percent of our Black [and/or] Hispanic students felt the same way. So, while we had an increase overall [in students’ confidence], there is a disparity there.
What steps have you taken to address the issues that surfaced from the student survey data?
I’ll pull things out for [teachers] to consider and also encourage them to dig into the data and think about what is it that they’ve been working on. We’ve had a lot of professional learning that I’ve led connected to creating inclusive learning environments and incorporating social emotional learning in our teaching, which we know helps improve inclusion in computer science and helping students feel like they belong.
There’s a lot of research that talks about collaborative learning opportunities being one way that kids, both females and students of color, tend to feel more included when they’re in computer science when you have collaborative opportunities. So, we try to build those into our courses. Representation within the materials that students are learning is also really important.
Making sure that students have choices connected to the projects that they’re working on is another way that you can foster more inclusive learning environments in computer science. We built a lot of that into the curriculum and the learning progressions.
