Research Portfolio

Throughout my MS program, I've continued working on the intersection of Inclusive Design and CS Education, building off of the work I contributed to for my undergraduate thesis. Having found encouraging evidence for the success of teaching with GenderMag in our work published in ICER 21,  we began working on scaling up and applying embedded inclusive design to in-person undergraduate CS education. The result was the creation, implementation, and analysis of an approach to integrate GenderMag across a full 4-year undergraduate curriculum at University X. Our work is ongoing but I have included the abstract from our first paper on this effort below:

Abstract: What if “regular” CS faculty each taught elements of inclusive design in “regular” CS courses across an undergraduate curriculum? Would it affect the CS program’s climate and inclusiveness to diverse students? Would it improve retention? Would students learn less CS? Would they actually learn any inclusive design? To answer these questions, we conducted a year-long Action Research investigation, in which 13 CS faculty integrated elements of inclusive design into 44 CS/IT offerings across a 4-year curriculum. The 613 affected students’ educational work products, grades, and/or climate questionnaire responses revealed significant improvements in students’ course outcomes (higher course grades and fewer course fails/incompletes/withdrawals), especially for marginalized groups; revealed that most students did learn and apply inclusive design concepts to their CS activities; and revealed that inclusion and teamwork in the courses significantly improved. These results suggest a new pathway for significantly improving students’ retention, their knowledge and usage of inclusive design, and their experiences across CS education—for marginalized groups and for all students.

As part of my Honors Thesis at Oregon State, I collaborated on an Action Research study to investigate how integrating inclusive design into Software Engineering curriculum impacts the inclusivity climate within an online class. The resulting paper was published in the proceedings of ICER 2021. 

During this study, I helped to design course materials to teach online Post-Bacc students gender inclusive design. To do this, we leveraged the GenderMag Method (gendermag.org). I also was one of the researchers to collect and clean incoming data and then analyze the data through qualitative coding. 

I've included the abstract of our publication below:

Motivation: Although CS Education researchers and practitioners have found ways to improve CS classroom inclusivity, few researchers have considered inclusivity of online CS education. We are interested in two such improvements in online CS education— besides being inclusive to each other, online CS students also need to be able to create inclusive technology. 

Objectives: We have begun developing a new approach that we term “embedded inclusive design” to address both of these goals. The essence of the approach is to integrate elements of inclusive design education into mainstream CS coursework. This paper presents three curricular interventions we have developed in this approach and empirically investigates their efficacy in online CS post-baccalaureate education. Our research questions were: How do these three curricular interventions affect (RQ1) the climate among online CS students and (RQ2) how online CS students honor the diversity of their users in the tech they create? 

Method: To answer these research questions, we implemented the curricular interventions in four asynchronous online CS classes across two CS courses within Oregon State University’s Ecampus and conducted an action research study to investigate the impacts. 

Results: Online CS students who experienced these interventions reported feeling more included in the major than they had before, reported positive impacts on their team dynamics, increased their interest in accommodating diverse users, and created more inclusive technology designs than they had before. 

Discussion: These results provide encouraging evidence that embedding elements of inclusive design into mainstream CS coursework, via the interventions presented here, can increase both online CS students’ inclusivity toward one another and the inclusivity of the technology these future CS practitioners create. 

The full results of this study can be found in a few forms. The ICER version and my honors thesis can be found under 'publications' (Publications Page). Another honors thesis from Aishwarya Vellanki on the same study can be found at this link: Aishwarya's Thesis. 

As an undergraduate researcher, I also had the opportunity to work with Oregon State's IT department in their effort to include the GenderMag method in their design workflows. For this effort, I acted as a trainer and consultant since I am a GenderMag expert. I trained groups of 3-6 IT employees (full-time employees as well as a few student employees) to use the GenderMag method. These trainings were done remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was also available to help any IT employees use or understand the GenderMag method outside of these trainings. This work required me to both be a trainer and a trainer-of-trainers to create IT employees who could teach their peers to use GenderMag, thus making it systematized within the department. I also attended weekly meetings between the lab and the OSUIT director.

My first project as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Burnett's lab was to take over the GenderMag Recorder's Assistant from a graduating Master's student. The GenderMag recorder's assistant helps users to go through a GenderMag walkthrough, recording inputs, screenshots, and responses. I first updated the code, performing code clean up and refactoring. Then, I began to work through the existing issues list while also reporting issues I found as I worked. This required both a knowledge of GenderMag and use of JS/HTML/CSS. Eventually, I also trained others to take over the project as I transitioned into new roles.

This open-source tool can be found on Github: Recorder's Assistant GitHub Repo