Levels of Student Participation and Stages of Relevant Curriculum

As part of the POGIL Teaching to Increase Diversity and Equity in STEM (TIDES) project, seven instructors at five institutions adopted Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) activities for their first-year courses. These POGIL activities were designed to regularly prompt students to reflect on the relevance of the curriculum to their own lives, but instructors did not successfully incorporate students' cultures into their classes. Students were significantly more comfortable with computers after taking the course with the POGIL activities, even compared to students taking a similar course from the same instructors. However, there was no overall effect on students' attitudes towards the role of computers in their lives or their interest in taking more CS classes. Based on the instructors' implementations, the authors developed “Levels of Student Participation and Stages of Relevant Curriculum” to help all POGIL faculty assess how to make their classrooms more inclusive and make their curriculum more relevant. As instructors become more reflective about their practices and gain experience with POGIL, the authors expect that these POGIL activities and practices will improve students' attitudes towards computing and students' interest in CS careers.