Abstract. The goal of this two-part work is to extend the small but growing body of research on the recent, rapid drop in undergraduate interest in CSE, especially among women. Both the first part, a qualitative study, and the second part, a curricular development effort, draw on a wide variety of disciplines, spanning the social sciences, CSE, and CSE education/pedagogy. The first and main part is an interview-based, descriptive study of pre-major undergraduates. By framing the findings in Eccles et al.'s expectancy--value model, an established theoretical model of academic motivation from the educational psychology literature, we describe how a variety of factors affect women and men's interest in the CSE major. As a theoretical contribution, we also propose refinements and extensions to the expectancy--value model for specialized application to research on entry into CSE and gender. The second part of our work is the design and formally evaluated pilot deployment of an educational intervention whose aim is to address some of the issues illuminated by the descriptive study. The "CSE Exploration Workshop," as it was billed, was designed to help pre-major undergraduates make better informed decisions about majoring in CSE and was a qualified success, based on an external evaluation.

• complete dissertation as PDF (5.7 MB)