BPC-AE – Scaling the STARS Alliance:
A National Community for Broadening Participation through Regional Partnerships
The Students & Technology in Academia, Research, and Service (STARS) Alliance of 20
colleges and universities and 88 regional partners is a vibrant community of practice for
broadening the participation of women, under-represented minorities, and persons with
disabilities in computing. We propose to scale the STARS Alliance practices and outcomes
nationally through the STARS Scaling Project. Through this project, we will realize the 2016
STARS Community Vision to engage 50 STARS universities (20 existing and 30 new) in the
STARS Leadership Corps (SLC), resulting in higher computing student diversity, enrollments,
and graduation rates. These universities will sustain the SLC through curricula. A vibrant
STARS community of practice will flourish through online social networking and an SLC
practices digital library collection. The STARS Institute nonprofit will sustain the annual STARS
Celebration to continue to engage new universities in the STARS Community. The STARS
Scaling Project builds upon the prior STARS grants to involve more people and produce
greater, sustained outcomes, with less funding.
1. Results from the STARS Initiation and Extension Projects
The STARS Initiation project “The STARS Alliance: A Southeastern Partnership for Broadening
Participation in Computing” was funded for three years (NSF-0540523, $2 million, 3/1/06–
2/28/09) and was extended (NSF-0739216, $2.6 million, 2/1/08-1/30/11) for a total of five years
of funding. With these grants, we have created a Southeastern community of interconnected
regional communities with a vision to advance innovation and discovery through partnerships to
broaden participation in computing.
Table 1.1: The STARS Community of Practice
Advancing innovation and discovery through regional partnerships to broaden participation
STARS Leadership Corps
Tiered participation of students,
professionals, & educators in
research and civic engagement
catalyzes regional partnerships
Research, Women’s, & Minority Universities
Industry
K-12
CORPS
Community
Colleges
Tiered Participation
The corps provides
stair-step role
Faculty,
models &
Industry
mentors
Graduate
students
Undergraduates
K-12 students
Community & Professional Organizations
STARS Celebration: Fosters national collaboration on STARS Leadership Corps, Mentoring, Pair Programming,
Research Experiences, and other BPC initiatives.
STARS Central Values: Excellence, Leadership, Community, Service & Civic Engagement
GOALS: Recruiting, Bridging, and Retaining underrepresented people in computing,
Advancing faculty, Sustaining and Disseminating BPC
Each regional community is led by a STARS member college or university with local partners
including K-12 schools, industry, and professional and community organizations such as the Girl
Scouts, Citizen Schools, the Black Data Processors Association, and ACM-W. STARS Alliance
activities are designed to advance the STARS Central Values of developing Technical
Excellence, Leadership, a sense of responsibility to use computing in service to society through
Civic Engagement, and a sense of belonging to a Computing Community. As discussed in
section 3.3, these values are effective for recruiting, bridging and retaining under-represented
groups in computing. Collaboration within STARS regional communities is catalyzed by the
1
STARS Leadership Corps (SLC), an innovative program that envelops new and existing
regional programs for BPC (e.g., K-12 outreach, community service, research experiences) with
common alliance-wide activities. The SLC is implemented at all STARS schools as a
repeatable one-year
Alliance activities advance the STARS Central Values of
program that begins and
 Excellence – Technical skill, confidence and interest in
ends with an alliance-wide
computing; Workforce preparation; Innovation & advancement.
annual leadership
 Leadership – Soft skills, including management, teamwork,
conference called the
writing, communication, and work / life balance.
STARS Celebration. The

Community – A sense of belonging and a common computing
Celebration inducts
identity not tied to gender, race, ethnicity or physical abilities.
students (and now faculty)
 Service &Civic Engagement – Sense of responsibility to use
into the Corps with activities
computing to serve society; Social relevance of computing.
built around the STARS
Central Values (see Table
3.5).
During the Celebration, the SLC is called to action to recruit, develop and become the next
generation of computing professionals. The SLC responds by undertaking leadership projects,
such as: Outreach to pre-college students to inform and excite kids about computing; College
outreach to support and advance college students; Community service to use computing skills
to serve society; and Research Experiences and Internships to advance innovation and to serve
by improving one’s own expertise in computing (e.g., Table 3.1). All projects include written
reflection, presentation to peers, and outreach components. Student SLC teams carry out
leadership projects during the academic year at their home schools, spending an average of 5
hours per week, including participation in a seminar series centered around the STARS Central
Values and tiered peer mentoring (have a mentor, be a mentor). SLC students and faculty
showcase successes at the next Celebration. Our theme of Advance Yourself, Advance
Others encourages student participation over multiple years, accepting support when needed
and giving back when able.
Leadership Projects
involve new and
existing regional BPC
activities. The SLC
envelopes regional
activities with common
alliance-wide
activities, creating an
extended community
and cohesive
evaluation across
programs &
organizations
Concentric ovals
show STARS
Central Values
(outer), SLC
activities that
advance the values
(middle), and
expected outcomes
(inner), as measured
by leading (bottom)
and lagging (top)
indicators
The STARS Leadership Corps Model
The SLC pools resources and enables cohesive evaluation across disparate BPC programs
spanning multiple years and diverse institutions and populations. The SLC employs Tiered
Participation among youth, academics, and professionals, creating stair-step role models and
mentors. For example, industry professionals work with SLC students to offer computing
programs for high school students; and faculty guide graduate students to mentor undergraduate research (as formalized in our new STARS TREU Demonstration Project). Leadership
activities catalyze regional partnerships and sustain them through a common purpose.
The STARS Alliance fosters adoption and scaling of BPC Demonstration Projects
(DP) by hosting DP workshops at the STARS Celebration. The Alliance further supports the
2
STARS Mentoring and Pair Programming DPs by supporting a second set of training workshops
each January (in Tampa) and by offering participant stipends to DP adopters. The STARS
Tiered Peer mentoring DP was developed by Dr. Nate Thomas at USFP to support
underrepresented students in computing. Using principles from his Ethnic-based Mentoring
Model, upper-class students mentor first year students. A holistic approach is used to support
mentor and mentee college adjustment, GPA, retention, graduation and career preparation. Dr.
Laurie Williams at NCSU leads the STARS Pair Programming (PP) DP to train and assist
faculty to use Pair Programming to deepen student learning.
Based on evaluation of its first 3.5 years (2006-2009), the STARS Alliance has shown
remarkable results, as summarized in Table 1.2 and the STARS Annual Report [Star09].
Table 1.2 - STARS Alliance Activities (left) and Impact (right) over 3.5 years, Aug 06–Dec 09
Goals: Recruiting, Bridging and Retention of underrepresented computing students
STARS Leadership Corps (SLC)
 SLC at 23 schools (Table 1.3)
 687 SLC students, 2.3 semesters each
 43% Black, 6% Hispanic; 50% women
 70% applied, 40% accepted to REUs
 25,254 K-12 students in SLC Outreach
Mentoring @ 11 schools, 150 SLC
mentors & 390 mentees
Pair Programming @ 12 schools, 30
classes with over 1,720 students
4 STARS Celebrations - 775 attendees
from STARS, AARCS, CAHSI, EL
Alliance, etc.
Enrollment: Dramatically increased STARS member
graduate enrollments 2006-09 (32%); (nationally -2%)
SLC: Increased bridging & retention leading indicators:
 Computing efficacy (mean = 4.76 to 5.18, 6 point scale)
 Computing commitment (mean = 4.08 to 4.64, 5 point scale)
 Perceived computing social relevance (mean = 4.66 to 4.98,
6 point scale)
 GPA (mean = 3.32 to 3.54)
 77% show increased interest in graduate programs
 UNCC controlled study shows improved outcomes for
SLC [Bar09]
Mentoring: workshop increased computing identity
(mean = 3.35 to 4.75, 6 point scale), [Boy10]
New instruments: Computing identity & social relevance
Department climate change: SLC students and faculty
lead, recruit, and build department community
Goals: Faculty Advancement, Sustainability, Dissemination
STARS Celebration
 CRA-W Academic Career Mentoring
 BPC Community Forums
 BPC training workshops
 Focus on institutionalizing BPC
Alliance Exchange
 Writing/Research Circles
 Monthly teleconferences
 Annual Steering Committee meeting
 Collaborative grant writing
 Collaborative research
 Informal faculty mentoring
 Institutional mentors for new members
 Interviews to engage Dept. chairs
Online collaboration and data sharing
 starsalliance.org
 WebOffice
 GoogleDocs
Institutional support: STARS inspired faculty and
increased BPC support, campus & faculty recognition
Faculty: 67 in STARS, 3 promoted (Dept. Chair, full prof.,
Associate Dean), 5 tenured, 4 grads became faculty
Advisory boards: National Image of Computing; Indiana
STARS; Caribbean Computing Center for Excellence;
Wide Web of Women Alliance; ACM SIGBP Formation
Committee; NSF BPC Community Meeting 2009
Institutionalization: 7 SLC service-learning courses; 5
SLC student organizations; & 30 Pair Programming
classes at 12 STARS schools.
Scorecards: Novel institutional reporting & feedback
Publications & Media: 13 journals, 44 conferences or
workshops, 17 presentations, 12 posters, 2 podcasts, 2
TV spots, 2 news stories
Grants leveraging SLC: BPC-CSDT, REU Site, GAANN,
SSTEM, ITEST, RET, CPATH, broader impact
3
4
Table 1.3: STARS Members and Participation (2006-2009)
(M=Mentoring, PP=Pair Programming, C=SLC Course, O=SLC Student Organization)
STARS
Members
Auburn
Florida A&M - FAMU
Florida State - FSU
Georgia Tech - GT
Landmark
Meredith
NC State - NCSU
Spelman
UNC Charlotte - UNCC
USF Poly - USFP
CPCC
EL Alliance - 2 schools
Georgia Southern - GSU
Hampton
J.C. Smith - JCSU
NC A&T - NCAT
Shaw
St. Augustine
U. New Orleans - UNO
USC-Columbia - USC
UT-Knoxville - UTK
Virginia Tech - VT
Type
Doctoral
HBCU-Doc
Doctoral
Doctoral
2yr LD
Women-UG
Doctoral
WHBCU-UG
Doctoral
UG
Comm. Coll
Alliance
Doctoral
HBCU-UG
HBCU-UG
HBCU-UG
HBCU-UG
HBCU-UG
Doctoral
Doctoral
Doctoral
Doctoral
# SLC participants
2006 2007 2008 2009
25
14
18 16
12
11
29 22
15
15
15 12
10
14
22
8
7
10
6
4
5
7
4
13
16
12 20
2
4
4
3
22
16
19 33
4
13
8
9
5
17
6
7
14 16
10
10 10
12 11
*
9
8
*
9
7
11
6
8
14
21 11
Projects
Course
PP,M,C
PP,M,C
C
M
PP
PP,M,O
O
PP,M,C
M
C
PP,C
PP,M,O
PP,M
M
PP,O
PP
PP,M,O
PP,M,C
SLC Highlights
K-6 Computer Clubs, 7 pubs
SLC integrates with scholarship program
X-Day series engages campus in computing
SLC mentors freshmen
For Learning Disabilities, no computing major
Tutors intro CS classes, UG research
Graduates mentor UG research, 21 pubs.
Geek Week engages campus in computing
Integrates SLC with REU Site & GAANN, 19 pubs
Leads mentoring program
Creating 2+2 with UNC Charlotte
Student-led SLCs at UT-Austin & ASU
Student-led workshop, Competitive software dev.
Conducts peer tutoring & mentoring
SLC fulfills volunteer hours required for CS degree
Builds community through socials & outreach
Participates in NCSU SLC
Partners with NC State for robotics outreach
Conducts peer tutoring & outreach
Conducts robotics outreach
Conducts mentoring & outreach
Pools resources, Connects research & outreach
Four STARS Celebrations have engaged 775 attendees, building a national BPC
community among STARS and other alliances including EL, CAHSI, A4RC, NCWIT, and
AccessComputing. Over 67 college faculty have engaged in BPC projects through STARS,
building partnerships with 88 organizations, implementing the STARS Leadership Corps at 23
universities (Table 1.3)1, integrating Pair Programming into 30 classes with over 1720
students, and implementing the STARS Mentoring model at 11 schools with 150 mentors and
390 mentees. The STARS Leadership Corps has engaged 687 college students in computing
outreach, research, and service, as a national corps of BPC change agents. These students
have conducted outreach promoting computing to 25,254 K-12 students.
Recruiting is achieved through
K-12 Outreach conducted by SLC
Initial
New
6613
students, college outreach on STARS
5980
campuses, and at the STARS
Celebration. 92% percent of SLC
5224
5143
4454
students felt that they helped others
4544
4544
4538
4454
understand the value of computing.
4011
Nineteen STARS members conducted
3599
K-12 Outreach, reaching 25,254 K-12
3232
3052
3044
students. 50% of SLC students
performed outreach as a primary
project, and felt they motivated K-12
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
students in technology. Figure 1.1
Figure 1.1: Computing (UG & Grad) Enrollments at initial and new compares initial (green) and extension
member institutions from 2002-03 to 2008-09, STARS yrs bold (blue) STARS member computing
enrollments. Between 2006-2008,
1
Landmark College could not institutionalize the SLC since they have no computing department. Landmark withdrew in 2009 when
they experienced severe budget cuts. They were replaced by Central Piedmont Community College. Two EL Alliance schools
participated in the SLC but were not funded, and are not considered STARS member schools in this proposal.
5
doctoral Alliance universities experienced dramatically higher graduate enrollments (32%)
while these numbers dropped nationally (-2%) [Taul09].
Bridging to interest and prepare undergraduates for computing graduate programs is
achieved by engaging STARS faculty to support REUs, holding a research day at each STARS
Celebration, informing SLC students of national opportunities, and providing professional
development workshops for writing graduate and REU program applications. Each year STARS
supports REUs for over six students in the Alliance and advertises REU Site programs to Corps
students. When surveyed in May 2009, 77% of Corps students showed increased interest in
graduate education [Star09]. The outstanding performance of initial doctoral STARS
institutions in graduate enrollments may be due, in part, to STARS initiatives.
Retention is achieved by providing SLC students with professional development through
regular Corps seminars, and engaging them in the BPC community, as well as improving
curricula through training and implementation of Pair
“Computing is more than just coding, it's
Programming (30 classes at 12 schools with over 1720
about knowing how to help our future
generations … create cutting edge
students). Nearly all SLC students felt that the STARS
technology to help out.” – SLC Student
Celebration was welcoming and builds community. All
SLC students felt their projects were meaningful. SLC
students experienced statistically significant increases in grade point average, computing
efficacy and commitment, and their perception that computing is socially relevant (Table 1.2)
[Star09]. These results are important because computing commitment, or intent to remain in
major, is a predictor for retention in academic programs and careers [Ajz91]. Pair Programming,
an educational strategy known to improve student skills and retention, was implemented at 12
STARS schools in 30 classes with over 1720 students. STARS Mentoring was implemented at
11 Alliance institutions in 2008-2009 with 150 mentors and over 390 mentees, while the
mentoring workshops raised SLC students’ sense of computing identity [Boy10].
Faculty advancement is achieved through professional development, and informal
mentoring relationships and affinity groups among faculty with common research interests.
STARS helps faculty combine research and service while raising the profile of BPC both locally
and nationally. At the Celebration, the Computing Research Association – Women (CRA-W)
hosts a career workshop, while the A4RC Alliance brings in outstanding researchers to serve as
invited speakers and role models for faculty and students. Alliance minority and female faculty
have been promoted, to full professor (T. Dahlberg-UNCC), department chair (Helen Chen), and
Associate Dean (Lois Hawkes, FSU), and five to associate professor (Tiffany Barnes- UNCC,
Helen Chen-JCSU, Cheryl Seals-Auburn, Mia Lustria-FSU, and Jason Black-FAMU).
Sustainability of STARS Alliance activities is achieved through the alignment and
institutionalization of the SLC, mentoring, and pair programming into curricular and co-curricular
structures. Seven SLC service-learning courses and five SLC student organizations have been
implemented at STARS schools. As shown in Tables 3.1 and 3.2, the SLC aligns with Industry
Affiliates, REU Sites, Honors, and other programs. STARS faculty have integrated Pair
Programming into 30 programming courses. Dissemination is achieved through the STARS
Celebration and web portal, publications, and collaborations.
In our opinion, the greatest challenge for BPC programs is to sustain them beyond initial
funding. STARS meets this challenge by integrating BPC activities into the core mission of
computing programs. With help from the STARS Community, computing programs learn how to
envelope new and existing BPC activities within the STARS Leadership Corps and integrate the
SLC into curricular and co-curricular programs. Adopting the SLC enables a cohesive
evaluation of diverse BPC activities in diverse institutions, while enhancing the culture of
computing and building lasting local partnerships for change. We propose to evolve the STARS
Southeastern Community to a National STARS Community to integrate, magnify, institutionalize
and sustain BPC practices through partnerships and the SLC.
6
2. Goals and Outcomes for the STARS Scaling Project
We propose to grow and strengthen the STARS Community to bring about broad national
adoption and institutionalization of the STARS Leadership Corps and realize the STARS
Community Vision for 2016, when the STARS Alliance turns ten.
The STARS Community Vision for 2016
 50 STARS colleges and universities will have institutionalized the STARS Leadership Corps,
resulting in higher computing student diversity, enrollments, and graduation rates
 A vibrant STARS community of practice will flourish through online social networking and a digital
library collection for SLC practices and assessment
 The STARS Institute nonprofit will sustain the annual STARS Celebration and Community to
continue STARS Scaling beyond 2016
The STARS Scaling project target populations include females, under-represented minorities
and persons with disabilities – in K-12 through graduate school, as well as faculty who are role
models for under-represented student populations in computing. We continue to strive to reach
our goals of recruiting, bridging, retention, faculty advancement, sustainability, and
dissemination, and add an additional goal of scaling STARS to a national community.
Motivation for Scaling the STARS Alliance: Our research and evaluation have
demonstrated that the STARS Alliance supports a highly connected and active community for
institutionalizing tiered participation in BPC activities through the STARS Leadership Corps,
while improving student attitude, success, and retention while broadening recruiting efforts,
supporting faculty, and
STARS Scaling Project Goals and Outcomes
improving department
 Recruiting of under-represented populations to increase
climate. National adoption of
computing enrollments and awareness
the STARS Leadership
 Bridging for under-represented populations to increase
Corps has the potential to
readiness to enter computing graduate programs and careers
dramatically change the

Retention of under-represented populations to increase GPA,
culture of computing,
computing efficacy and graduation rates
establishing leadership,

Advancement of computing faculty role models to increase
excellence, community, and
faculty research and grants scholarship, tenure, and promotion.
civic engagement as central
 Sustainability of the STARS Community to institutionalize
values for today’s computing
SLC practices at STARS member colleges and universities
students, who will become

Dissemination of STARS activities, outcomes, and
tomorrow’s professionals,
assessment to promote broadening participation through
professors and policyregional communities and SLC practices
makers. The STARS
 Scaling of the STARS Community for national adoption and
Celebration and SLC form a
institutionalization of the STARS Leaderships Corps,
new national community
participation in the Celebration, and regional Celebrations
that recognizes BPC as
integral to the missions of educational, community, and professional computing organizations.
Like the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing [GHC] and the Tapia Celebration
of Diversity and Computing [Tapia], the STARS Celebration generates excitement about
computing and support for women and minorities, but the Celebration catalyzes this excitement
into action for both majority and minority populations, training and inspiring faculty and students
to engage in BPC. The SLC follows through, solidifying regional partnerships around student
and faculty leadership projects, much like the successful EPICS program [EPICS], to better the
community and advance innovation and discovery. Given that we have accomplished this
much, why should the NSF continue to fund the STARS Alliance? The 20 STARS
members are solving the biggest challenge for BPC, on our campuses, by leveraging the SLC to
sustain great BPC programs beyond the funding cycle; but our successes cannot be scaled
simply through publications and presentations. National scaling of the SLC can only happen
within a vibrant STARS Community anchored by the STARS Celebration as a convening forum
7
and bolstered by a virtual community for formal and informal collaboration. We request an
additional five years of funding to permanently sustain a vibrant and growing STARS
Community and the annual STARS Celebration. The STARS Scaling Project budget of $3.75
million will support and assess 50 STARS universities (30 new); 900 SLC participants and the
K-12 students engaged by them; 1,000 STARS Celebration participants; 61 stipends for
Mentoring, Pair Programming, or Tiered REU adopters; and 25 Regional Events. By
comparison, the current STARS grants provide $4.6 million to support and assess 20
universities; 900 SLC participants (no K-12 assessment); 1,000 Celebration participants; 36
stipends for Mentoring or Pair Programming adopters (no TREU); and no Regional Events. The
STARS Scaling budget further supports creation of a STARS virtual community and social
network, a rich digital collection of SLC Practices, and the STARS Institute, a non-profit to
sustain the STARS Community and Celebration through corporate and alumni sponsorship.
Lessons that inform the STARS Scaling Project
 SLC courses sustain BPC practices while fulfilling ACM curricular guidelines for Social and
Professional Issues, but additional mechanisms are needed for multi-year SLC participation.
 STARS graduate student enrollment increases may be due to SLC and REU participation. A
new Tiered REU demonstration project (TREU) will leverage and magnify this outcome.
 With training, the SLC Leaders can be faculty, staff, or students.
 SLC Evaluation Research Assistants, and a persistent online collaboration tool reduce overhead.
 Enabling faculty SLC leadership projects will involve more faculty from each school, allowing
variable time commitment. Formalizing STARS faculty mentoring can further advance faculty.
 STARS members demonstrate practices for integrating BPC programs, working with partners,
and enhancing curricula. An online practices collection is needed to support replication, scaling
 Modest stipends motivate faculty to lead STARS Mentoring and PP DPs. Offering SLC
dissemination stipends will help populate the SLC practices digital library collection.
 The tiered structure of the STARS Community enables higher impact for low initial investment:
tens of faculty reach hundreds of college students who reach thousands of K-12 students.
Online social networking can increase the impact of STARS activities and Affinity Groups.
 The STARS Celebrations uniquely emphasize cohort attendance and leadership. This fosters a
national community grounded within regional communities. We will establish a nonprofit to
permanently sponsor the STARS Celebration, beyond the STARS Scaling Project.
 SLC alumni continue to identify with the STARS Community. The STARS Celebration and an
online community can leverage alumni to further STARS goals.
 Because it enhances the SLC student experience, all SLC should participate in mentor training.
 SLC K-12 Outreach develops SLC students’ leadership skills, while improving K-12 recruitment.
STARS evaluation should be expanded to assess SLC impact on K-12 students.
Intellectual merit: The STARS Scaling project will strengthen and grow a community of
practice that advances innovation and discovery by broadening participation in computing. The
community will be realized through a nationally connected system of regional partnerships
catalyzed by the STARS Leadership Corps (SLC). The project will contribute to BPC research
by assessing 50 universities’ participation in the SLC (including K-12 impact), pair programming,
tiered mentoring, tiered REUs, the STARS Celebration, and an online social network and digital
practices library. The STARS Social Network will establish a pioneering technology to support a
vibrant community of practice integrated with mobile games and technology.
Broader impact: Fifty colleges and universities will have institutionalized the SLC,
resulting in higher computing student diversity, enrollments, and graduation rates. A vibrant
STARS community of practice will flourish through online social networking and a digital library
collection for SLC practices and assessment. The STARS Institute nonprofit will sustain the
annual STARS Celebration and Community to continue STARS Scaling beyond 2016.
8
3. Implementation Plan
3.1 Aligning with Similar Programs and Curricula
STARS Alliance activities are aligned with similar programs largely through the SLC and the
STARS Celebration. The SLC puts a common wrapper around a diverse set of team-based
Leadership Projects which include new and existing BPC programs in K-12, higher education,
industry, and community organizations, such as those shown in Table 3.1 (top rows). The SLC
brings together the separate (often small) groups of students participating in various BPC
programs to form a larger community, and enables cohesive evaluation across diverse BPC
interventions. Furthermore, the STARS Celebration has become a convener for many
synergistic BPC organizations, such as those shown in Table 3.1 (last row).
Table 3.1: STARS Activities are Aligned with Similar Programs and Curricula (Examples)
Research Experiences
for Undergraduates
Outreach with Industry
and Professional
Organizations
Student Organizations
Community Service
Tutors and Mentors
On-campus events for
K-12 students, parents,
counselors
Computing Roadshows
for Middle and High
school outreach
STARS Demonstration
Projects
STARS Celebration
SLC students participate in Alliance member REU programs (Auburn, JCSU, UNCC,
USC, VT), DREU/CREU, A4RC REUs, and other REU programs and then host lab
demonstrations and Roadshows to convey the excitement of research to K-12.
SLC students provide “stair-step” role models by K-12 outreach with industry: Black
Data Processors Association (UNCC, JCSU); Women and Math Mentoring Org
(Meredith); Community Neighborhood Partnership (FSU); NCSU ePartners program
(NCSU); Geek Week (Spelman, CPCC); Computer Science Transfer Programs
(USFP); Students for Academic Recruiting and Retention in Computing (UTK)
SLC students strengthen existing and start new student organizations: ACM/ACM-W
(Hampton, UNCC, GSU, UNO); Women in CS (Hampton, NCSU, FSU); Gamer’s
Alliance (UNCC); IEEE (JCSU, GSU); African-American Women in CS (FAMU);
SLC students work with: Citizen Schools (CPCC, UNCC); Girl Scouts (UNCC, JCSU,
Meredith, USC, GSU); Boys and Girls Clubs (FAMU, FSU, GSU); K-12 Computer
Camps & Clubs (Auburn, Spelman, UNCC, JCSU); Senior Centers (NCSU,
Meredith); Science Olympiad (USFP, Spelman); WISE Chamber (FSU)
SLC students are tutors/mentors for High School (GT, FAMU); Middle School (FSU,
JCSU); YMCA (NCAT); Home schoolers (UTK, UNCC); College (FSU, NCSU,
Hampton, UNCC, GSU, NCAT, NCSU, UTK, GT, USFP, FAMU, Spelman, Meredith)
SLC students assist and serve as role-models for K-12 events: Freshman Orientation
(UNCC, FAMU); CoolComputing@Tech for HS (GT); Career Night (FSU); Fall/Spring
Outreach, World Usability Day (Auburn, Spelman); Math Day (Meredith); Extended
Learning Experiences (USC); Communities in Schools (UNCC)
SLC student presentations to inform/excite kids about computing and advise on
applying to college (GT, JCSU, FSU, FAMU, Hampton, NCSU, USFP, UNCC, USC,
UTK)
SLC students use Culturally Situated Design Tools to engage middle schoolers
(GSU, FAMU, Hampton, UNCC); STARS Faculty implement Pair Programming (12
schools)) and Mentoring (11 schools) – see Table 1.3 for school list
A4RC hosts Research Day; CRA-W hosts faculty & student mentoring workshops; EL
Alliance hosts 4 SLC Teams; Workshops on Mentoring, CSDTs, Pair Programming,
ARCS, Assistive Technology (supported by AccessComputing Alliance); Attendees
from CAHSI Alliance, Anita Borg Institute, Indiana STARS + many others; Sessions
offered by Girl Scouts, Image of Computing project, GUTS+; BPC Community forum
The SLC is also offered as a Service Learning Course (see Table 3.2) that is aligned with ACM
curricular guidelines, which recommend 16 hours of curricula on Social and Professional
Issues with topics such as social implications of computing, and public policy, gender, cultural
and accessibility issues (e.g. underrepresentation of minorities, women and the disabled in the
computing profession) [ACM08]. These topics are explicitly addressed in the SLC courses. The
SLC courses also promote the values of Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than
1,100 college and university presidents dedicated to promoting personal and social
responsibility, community service, civic engagement, and service-learning in higher education
[CAMP]. The SLC courses contribute to these goals, and are often the only computing courses
that support the Campus Compact mission.
9
3.2 Creative & Strategic Actions
To realize STARS Scaling Project goals, we will:
 Enhance the SLC to include models for institutionalization and multi-year participation, Affinity
Groups, Training for REUs, SLC Leader training, and SLC participation (Section 3.2.1);
 Promote organic growth of regional communities and SLC scaling through dissemination tools,
funding, a new non-profit, and partnerships (Section 3.2.2); and
 Leverage the STARS Celebration and a new online social network with a purpose to evolve
STARS Southeastern into a national community (Section 3.2.3).
3.2.1 Enhancing & Institutionalizing the STARS Leadership Corps (SLC)
 Institutionalize a Multi-Year SLC
Table 3.2 lists curricular and co-curricular structures that STARS members use to institutionalize
the SLC. These approaches sustain the SLC by integrating SLC leadership into a university’s
core mission (e.g., part of faculty teaching load, administrator’s job, or student organization).
The Scaling project will allow us to support 20 existing STARS schools as they institutionalize
the SLC into multi-year programs, and to support 30 new STARS schools to follow suit. For
example, UNCC offers a foundational SLC service learning course and attaches a STARS
engagement requirement to scholarship programs, capstone REU courses, and an honors
program (future). These illustrate how to infuse the STARS values of excellence, leadership,
community and civic engagement into several co-curricular junctures.
Table 3.2: Curricular and Co-Curricular Structures for Implementing The SLC Model
Service-learning
courses
Industry
Student organizations
Administrative staff
Graduation
1 and 2 credit SLC courses at UNCC (since 2007), Auburn, VT & CPCC (2009), and
FAMU (2010); 3 credits at GSU (2008), FSU (2010), and at CPCC for all 58 N.C.
community colleges (in development). Spelman offers SLC independent study.
Industry affiliates sponsor NCSU, FSU, & FAMU SLC events and internships
New SLC student organizations (NCSU, Spelman, UNO, USFP, USC) and SLC
partnerships with ACM/ACM-W chapters (Hampton, UNCC, UNO). NCSU SLC
includes students from Shaw and St. Augustine’s.
FSU, USFP, GT, & UNCC department or college staff manage their SLCs.
SLC fulfills JCSU Community Service Hours required for graduation
Honors & scholarships
UNCC, Hampton & FAMU scholarship and honors students perform SLC service.
Broader impacts
Auburn & UNCC research grants support REUs, the SLC, and graduate mentors.
Capstones & REUs
SLC integrates with capstone projects and REU experiences (see Table 3.1).
General education
UNCC will offer a lighter SLC course to engage and recruit undeclared majors.
Learning communities
UNCC SLC students perform outreach at freshmen learning community seminar.
 Affinity Groups
Since STARS inception, faculty with similar interests have formed informal working groups to
help one another solve problems. However, SLC students have not leveraged their connections
across universities to share Leadership Project resources or reflections. We will form Affinity
Groups (AGs), supported by the STARS social network, to enable both SLC students and
faculty to more effectively share resources, successes, and lessons learned. STARS
Demonstration Projects have already been operating as AGs, with training at the Celebration
and January workshops, separate teleconferences, and reporting requirements for stipends.
We formalize this model by offering formal AGs for SLC Leadership Projects including Middle
and High School Outreach, TREUs, Mentoring, College/Peer Outreach, and others as needed.
These AGs will have common areas in the STARS social networking site and training and
planning sessions at the Celebration. We will assess the impact of AGs through resources
shared, attendance at training and planning meetings, and improved outcomes for AG efforts.
10
 Enhance SLC with Training for REUs (TREU)
As noted in Table 1.1, 70% of 2009 SLC students have applied for REUs, indicating that SLC
students are more aware of research opportunities. However, only 40% participated in REUs.
The STARS Scaling project adds Training for Research Experiences for Undergraduates
(TREU) as a Demonstration Project to extend our success in promoting undergraduate
research. TREU will leverage, scale and adapt the A4RC REU Prep courseware to prepare
SLC students for research, while it also trains faculty and graduate students in Dr. Ann Gates’
Affinity Research Groups model [ARG09] to successfully mentor diverse undergraduates in
computing research, and helps faculty seek REU funding.
STARS and A4RC have been partnering for three years. Three STARS members
(NCAT, VT, GT) are also A4RC members. The A4RC has adopted the STARS Celebration as
the annual conference for A4RC faculty and students. Each year, A4RC hosts a “Research
Day” that includes a poster session to showcase REU achievements. The A4RC has been
offering an REU prep course as part of their "research pod" model [A4RC], to prepare students
for REUs, and to contribute to an online repository of REU courseware. The A4RC repository
includes presentations and videos of diverse groups and leaders discussing common readings,
personal experiences, and resources (e.g., library resources). Each class module includes
discussion points, in-class activities, and short homework assignments. The common readings
are of broad interest, but often focus on concerns of underrepresented populations, such as
Green & Scott's "Journey to the Ph.D." and Wayne Booth's "The Craft of Research." A4RC
schools use the modules for both courses and seminars.
We will provide training at the Celebration for faculty and graduate student research
mentors in the ARG model to support diverse undergraduate research teams. Through ARG,
mentors work with undergraduates to set project goals and expectations and develop student
skills in three key areas: research methods, experimentation and validation, and technical
writing and speaking. Through ARG, undergraduates become part of a research culture,
learning to speak competently about research and serving as role models for one another.
We will integrate the A4RC courseware and ARG philosophy into SLC seminar series
and credit-bearing REU Courses aligned with the SLC. We will extend the A4RC REU
repository (and include it in the SLC Practices digital library – section 3.2.2) with modules for
new categories related to STARS and ARG, such as socially relevant research, connecting REU
with SLC outreach, and developing ARG research skills.
By adding research preparation to the SLC, we expect to increase students’ confidence
in their ability to do research and thereby increase the number of SLC students who engage in
REUs. Four STARS schools (UNCC, VT, USC, and Auburn) have NSF REU Sites. UNCC’s
grant includes funding to lead the NSF CISE REU Sites Evaluation group, which has produced
an REU Assessment Toolkit [REUS]. Leaders from these programs will conduct training to
prepare more faculty to be REU mentors and to write effective proposals for REU funding.
 Support SLC Leaders with Affinity Groups and Training
When the STARS Alliance was formed, each member school had an Academic Liaison (AL), a
faculty member responsible for implementing the SLC, serving on the Alliance Steering
Committee, and institutionalizing the SLC in their department. Increasingly, the AL roles are
split, where graduate students, staff, or junior faculty lead the SLC, and senior faculty or
administrators champion SLC institutionalization. AL contributions to the Alliance Steering
Committee vary widely, with some faculty providing detailed programmatic steering and others
only checking in for status updates. To more realistically assign responsibilities, we redefine the
roles of AL and Alliance Steering Committee members (see section 4). We also introduce the
role of SLC Leader as the person (faculty, staff or student) who manages the day-to-day
activities of SLC student participation. We will form an SLC Leader Affinity Group to provide
training, mentorship and peer support to SLC Leaders. This will reduce the burden on schools
who must often train new SLC Leaders, and will provide SLC Leaders with more credit, support,
11
and professional development. Training will take place at the STARS Celebration. Former SLC
Leaders will receive stipends (Table 3.4) to mentor new SLC Leaders.
 Advance Faculty through SLC Participation
We added the goal of “Faculty Advancement” to the STARS Extension project (2008) to support
faculty who manage the SLC at their institutions. These computing faculty are often called upon
to lead BPC initiatives because of their underrepresented status and capacity to serve as BPC
role models. Faculty, and particularly new assistant professors, can benefit from being involved
with a BPC community although the time spent often doesn’t “count” towards tenure and
promotion. Since 2008, we have offered writing and research circles and faculty mentoring
workshops at the Celebration. We formed Writing Circles to increase faculty publications in
both BPC and traditional computing research publications. We formed Research Circles to
foster collaboration aligned with common interests, particularly related to gaming, computing
education, and assistive technology research. We provide Faculty Career Mentoring by offering
a Faculty Advancement Track and a CRA-W sponsored Faculty Mentoring Workshop at the
STARS Celebration, and we encourage participation at the CRA-W, CDC and ABI career
mentoring workshops. Of the Alliance steering committee, 5 junior and 3 senior computing
faculty from underrepresented groups have been promoted since 2006 (see Table 1.2).
The STARS Scaling Project will engage faculty as SLC participants (not just as AL) to
increase the number of faculty who engage in BPC and benefit from the STARS Community.
Faculty can undertake their own SLC leadership projects, such as implementing Mentoring, Pair
Programming, or TREU; including SLC practices in the digital library; hosting a Celebration
workshop; or mentoring a new STARS school starting an SLC. We will add a STARS faculty
mentoring program to formally support faculty advancement. New Proposal Writing Workshops
at the STARS Celebration will help faculty write better proposals and leverage their STARS
participation to attract synergistic BPC grants and enhance broader impact of research grants.
 Integrate STARS Demonstration Projects (DP) as Faculty SLC Projects
The STARS Alliance supports two DPs by hosting a two-part training series at USFP (January)
and at the STARS Celebration (August) and by providing adopter stipends tied to outcomes
reporting. We will continue to support the STARS Mentoring and Pair Programming DPs and
the new Training for REUs DP by hosting training at the STARS Celebration and providing
stipends to faculty who adopt DPs as SLC projects. Including DPs as faculty SLC leadership
projects allows us to leverage the SLC as a connector of BPC efforts and enables us to treat
faculty and student SLC members similarly for evaluation. This may help us better understand
the impact of community and BPC action research on all tiers of participation, from K-12 to
college students and faculty. To economize, we will hold the January training sessions online.
We will continue to host Celebration workshops for Culturally Situated Design Tools, African
American Researchers in Computer Science and other BPC DPs not funded by STARS.
3.2.2 Scaling and Sustaining the STARS Leadership Corps
We will promote organic growth of regional communities and sustain SLC scaling efforts through
digital library dissemination, focused funding, and a new non-profit.
 SLC Practices Collection within the BPC Digital Library
In collaboration with Dr. Alice Agogino of the Engineering Pathways project, we will
enable computing departments and student organizations to adopt the SLC by choosing
practices that fit their needs from an SLC Practices Collection within the BPC digital library at
BPCPortal.org (See Agogino letter.) We will use the software infrastructure in the digital library
to catalog, present and disseminate courseware and “how-to” resources as listed in Table 3.3.
Courseware will support SLC service-learning courses and REU prep courses, REU and SLC
seminars. SLC how-to resources are practices for institutionalization, leadership projects,
logistics, and assessment. The BPC Digital Library provides metadata tags in place to handle
all media types, learning module details and comprehensive cross-indexing necessary to create
12
complete records of REU and SLC courseware and other STARS resources. For example, the
catalog-linking feature relates a video resource to related presentations, research assessment,
and publications. This will allow users to easily locate both REU and SLC specific courseware
and related non-STARS resources available in the BPC Portal as well.
Practice Type
Courseware
Learning
Community
Seminars
Institutionalization
Leadership
Projects
Logistics
Assessment
Table 3.3: SLC Practices Collection in the BPC Digital Library
SLC Practice Description
Curricula for SLC service-learning courses aligned with ACM curricular
guidelines for Social and Professional Issues; and REU Prep courses. Syllabi;
lesson plans, activities, educational games, discussion points, assessment
A BPC Portal Service Learning Community Page will connect learners and
educators with SLC related educational resources, news, and events.
Presentations and videos on STARS Values; SLC-REU and A4RC-REU videos
Practices to align SLC with curricular and co-curricular programs (e.g., Table
3.2), inspired by NCWIT “In a Box” and AccessComputing practices repositories
Resources for SLC leadership projects, e.g., K-12 Roadshows and curricula for
Citizen Schools apprenticeships, Girl Scouts computing badges, summer camps
Management resources, such as “how-to”s for recruitment, partnership and
sponsorship development, selecting leadership projects, organizing students
SLC instruments, IRB, data collection, & assessment tools
Dr. Cheryl Seals (Auburn STARS) will interface with Dr. Agogino to lead this effort. Dr.
Seals is a member of the existing BPCportal.org development team with responsibility to
provide for user interface and usability. As noted in Dr. Agogino’s letter “utilization of the BPC
Digital Library cataloging software will allow a project that involves 50 colleges and universities
to better create and experience a sense of community. The ability to comment on the resources
and the ability to add related resources or updates based on different student populations and
institutional types will create depth in community through sharing of assessment, practice and
outcomes related to resources. The BPC Portal can also expand sharing and engagement by
providing a service-learning community page that focuses on STARS participants, but is also
open to the broader BPC community. In addition, the BPC Portal will provide links to the STARS
online social network and can provide embedded search tools for these technologies and sites.”
 Focus Participant Support on New Adoption, Financial Need, Dissemination,
and Regional Communities
Current STARS members first offer the SLC as an informal program managed by a faculty
champion. SLC students receive a $500 stipend per semester, and travel support to the
STARS Celebration. After about two years, STARS schools institutionalize the SLC, and
replace the stipend with other incentives like course or program credit. Therefore, we will focus
funding on New SLC startup, supporting new schools for two years to start and institutionalize
the SLC. Table 3.4 shows our new funding model.
Table 3.4: SLC Participant Support Model
SLC Participant Stipend –
New Schools
SLC Participant Stipend –
Need Based
SLC Participant Stipend –
Disseminator
$500 per semester - SLC student participant.
New schools only for 2 year window.
$500 per semester - SLC student participants who must reduce their work hours.
to participate in the SLC. Any school.
$500 per semester - SLC participant who contributes to SLC dissemination
repositories or STARS related publications. Any school.
SLC Participant Stipend –
Faculty & Leader
$500-$2,000 per semester - SLC Leaders, or SLC faculty leadership projects
(e.g., lead Writing Circle, implement Pair Programming).
STARS Celebration
Travel Scholarships
Travel costs - New SLC students & faculty, SLC Leaders, SLC participants with
outcomes to share. All competitively awarded.
$50-$2,000 per event – Participant support costs for mini-Celebrations,
competitions, other events that bring together smaller groups of STARS members
and partners, and hosting SLC workshops at other computing conferences.
STARS Regional Activities
13
SLC students and faculty can earn stipends for dissemination through repositories and
publications. We will also provide need-based SLC stipends for deserving students. Our model
embeds support for STARS Mentoring, Pair Programming, and Tiered REU demonstration
projects and faculty advancement through stipends for faculty adopters. We continue to fund the
STARS Celebration as a central key to the success of STARS, while we establish a non-profit to
assume this support. To insure that regional partnerships remain a focus as the STARS
Community grows nationally, we will support STARS regional activities such as local minicelebrations and SLC workshops at other conferences.
 STARS Institute Nonprofit for Industry and Alumni Sponsorship
We will establish the STARS Institute, a nonprofit to sustain the STARS Celebration, targeted
SLC participant support, the STARS Community, and assessment beyond the timeframe of the
STARS Scaling Project. The Institute will establish STARS Community Awards to recognize
individual and institutional excellence in advancing the STARS Values and will seek to engage
SLC students who have graduated in a STARS Alumni community. The Institute will target
corporate and private donor sponsorship, particularly STARS Alumni who are now in industry.
T. Dahlberg will jump start this effort during a sabbatical to begin January 2011. Dr.
Larry Dennis, Dean of the College of Communication and Information (FSU) will provide his
long-time expertise with development. We have budgeted $20,000/year for consulting advice,
with intention to increase support for Institute personnel through fund-raising.
Our vision of the STARS Institute is inspired by the National Center for Women and
Information Technology (NCWIT) and the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), which hosts the Grace
Hopper Celebration for Women and Technology [NCWI, ABI, GHC]. Dr. Telle Whitney, ABI CEO
will provide guidance, drawing upon her tremendous success in scaling the ABI and GHC.
3.2.3 A National STARS Community of Practice for Scaling the SLC
We will leverage the STARS Celebration and a new online social network with a purpose to
support evolution of the STARS Southeastern community to a national STARS Community.
 The STARS Celebration – A National BPC Leadership Conference & Incubator
The STARS Celebration has become a BPC convener, with over 775 participants since 2006.
This four-day conference takes place each August to celebrate SLC successes while inducting
new students, and now faculty, into the Corps. The conference complements the Grace Hopper
Celebration of Women and Computing and the Tapia Celebration of Diversity and Computing
with a unique focus on developing cohorts of SLC students and providing inspiration, training,
and support to engage new leaders to implement and sustain BPC programs. Students attend
in cohorts comprised of returning and new SLC students and faculty mentors from the same
institution. During SLC Planning sessions, SLC students form teams, reflect on new ideas, and
plan their upcoming academic year leadership projects. To enhance quality and keep the
theme of self-leadership, we have established a STARS Celebration Program Committee which
includes faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students to referee abstracts for presentations,
workshops, and posters. Through the Scaling project, we are adding Affinity Group SLC
cohorts and allow for their leadership project planning at the Celebration. As shown in Table
3.5, conference tracks include the STARS central values, while providing time for community
development, training, and planning for SLC leadership projects.
With funding from the UNCC REU Site and the CRA-W Computing REUs (CREU), we
began the UNC Charlotte Social Networking and Games (SNAG) project to foster team-building
and networking at the 2009 Celebration. A team of 4 UNCC REU students created Table Tilt, a
collaborative team-building game using 2 to 6 iPod Touches or iPhones. The student SNAG
team also created Snag’em, snagemgame.com, a pervasive game where conference attendees
fulfill increasingly difficult missions to find and interact with other people [Fin10, Pow10]. One
third of 2009 Celebration attendees played Snag’em while over half participated in Table Tilt
tournaments, and players found that the games helped them meet and speak to people they
14
never would have approached otherwise. We will extend SNAG to integrate the electronic
business card exchange features of CONNECT, the RFID based system developed by Tracy
Camp to foster networking at the Grace Hopper Celebration (see Camp letter). We will also
extend SNAG to encourage people to visit the STARS social network and compete to create
and conduct the best SLC activities for inclusion in the SLC collection.
Table 3.5: STARS Celebration – Tracks and example sessions
(italics: by Scaling project, bold: by STARS partners)
Student oriented tracks
Research and advanced technologies. E.g., TREU, A4RC Alliance Research
Technical
Day; Affinity REU Group Mentoring Workshop; Agile Software Lab; Web 2.0
Excellence
Tools; ACM Distinguished Speakers; Career Fair; Game Development
Professional development. E.g., Communication, teamwork & time management
Leadership
skills; AARCS grad school myth-breaking; Industry & government IT careers
Mentoring, social networking E.g., CRA-W Student Mentoring Workshop; SNAG
Computing
Community
student-developed mobile phone games for social networking; CONNECT
Outcomes and how-to sessions for SLC projects and synergistic BPC practices.
Civic Engagement E.g., SLC outreach how-to, STARS school & SLC posters, sessions by Image of
Computing, Girl Scouts, Entry Point!, EL Alliance, GUTS, Online Safety LLC
SLC planning
SLC cohorts meet to plan leadership projects for the upcoming year
Faculty oriented tracks
Faculty work-life support and development. E.g., Writing/Research Circles,
Faculty
Advancement
Proposal Writing; CRA-W Faculty Career Mentoring Workshop
Interactive meetings to share ideas & plan leadership projects. E.g., Executive
Affinity Groups
Steering Committee, Academic Liaisons, New ALs, Regions
Longer training to implement STARS Tiered Peer Mentoring, Pair Programming,
Workshops
Culturally Situated Design Tools, SLC Evaluation, Leading an SLC
As part of the Scaling Project, we seek to promote interaction and information exchange
among different STARS schools and deepen those interactions with the STARS online social
network (described next). Leveraging technology promotes the growth of the STARS
Community while illustrating the social relevance of computing.
 STARS Community Online Social Network
The STARS social network site will advance one of our core goals by providing a broader,
stronger, and longer term computing community for STARS participants, including new
members, alumni, and partners. The site will provide a platform for informal sharing and
dissemination of activities and artifacts within STARS, providing additional methods for
community members to
Current STARS Ad Hoc Communications
learn from each other and
communicate directly
Google groups
SLC Leadership Project planning
around common goals and
Facebook groups
SLC Team Activity reporting
Google docs
activities. This will lead to
Email
SLC Student reflections
Survey Monkey
sustainable practices by
Google forms
Regional & Alliance Event organizing
Blogs
engaging community
Listserv
Teleconference
Alliance
Exchange
members in documenting,
Websites
Twitter
SLC students, partner networking
Webex
reflecting and sharing their
Snag’Em
Disseminating SLC Practices
BPC Portal
activities, and providing
pathways for continued
interaction and participation during and after SLC participation. Currently, STARS schools and
students use a variety of existing online tools in an ad-hoc manner for activities, planning,
reflections, and communication, using whatever is most convenient. As the STARS Community
grows, more consistent approaches are needed to support collaboration and dissemination.
15
We will build an extensible online social network to unify formal and informal
collaboration, data collection, project management, and dissemination. Existing social
networking and community sites do not currently offer such a unified, extensible platform. We
will create a customized site by building upon an open source social network platform, Elgg
[ELGG]. Elgg provides a
New: STARS Social Network Site
number of customizable
capabilities along with
SLC Leadership Project planning
Teams
Facebook
plug-ins for additional
SLC Team Activity reporting
Groups
functionality. To foster
SLC Student reflections
Google docs/forms
Events
Files
participation, we will
Regional & Alliance Event organizing
Snag ‘Em
Blogs
Alliance Exchange
integrate a variety of
STARS external site
Reports
SLC students, partner networking
STARS-specific activities
Comments
Connexions
Disseminating SLC Practices
into the site and promote
Messages
communication and
networking around those activities. We have developed an initial site structure and will develop
plug-ins for STARS-specific activities to:
 Allow SLC teams to organize, plan, and promote outreach, service, and other events.
 Support the creation and growth of Affinity Groups, for more focused communication
among participants with similar interests and activities. Support discovery of others
through feeds and recommendations for similar students, faculty, teams, and affinity
groups.
 Support written reflection on SLC activities, such as through activity reports and blogs.
 Integrate with other technologies and sites, such as Snag’Em, Facebook, and Twitter.
This open source platform will also allow for SLC students to develop additional functionality
and features themselves and enable reuse of these new plug-ins by other Elgg sites. Our site
can then be replicated and customized for other alliances and BPC efforts.
3.3 Motivation and Research Base
The STARS Alliance was inspired by pre-existing collaborative efforts between multiple
organizations to support underrepresented minorities [SUCCEED, LEAD, NCWI, MNSC, GEAR,
NACM, NSF-PI, CDC, Asp00, TAP, Gan99]. Many of these programs incorporate the efforts of
academia with industry, K-12 schools, and community organizations, and engage computing
college students in mentoring, outreach, research, or service. The SLC framework envelops
programs like these with community building and development opportunities in a flexible way, to
unite diverse programs at multiple institutions.
We have synthesized the BPC research into the STARS Central Values of Technical
Excellence, Leadership, Community, and Service and Civic Engagement which support our
goals for student recruitment, bridging and retention, and faculty advancement.
Technical excellence is our first value because excellence in computing is a prerequisite
for innovation, discovery, and leadership. Competence in computing promotes self-efficacy and
interest, so we first seek to support student skills in programming and academic achievement.
Pair Programming enables student success, particularly for women, from introductory to
graduate courses [Bev02, McD02, Nag03, Wil02a, Wil02b]. Undergraduate research (REU)
helps students develop technical skill while increasing retention and interest in graduate
programs [Asp00, Dah08, Rus07]. The TREU will be enhanced by the diversity of our faculty
and graduate mentors, providing role models for underrepresented students as in the
CRAW/CDC Distributed REU or the “Tapia Spend a Summer with a Scientist” programs [Ale98].
Our emphasis on tiered Tiered REU (TREU) mentoring develops graduate student skills in
teaching and guiding undergraduates, while the engagement in research develops technical skill
and potential for innovation in the undergraduates, graduates, and even faculty. At the
Celebration, technical sessions expose students to new technologies and research while
16
building a sense of community and belonging, making it easier for students to see themselves
as computing leaders. Through their K-16 outreach, SLC students become the experts and
internalize that leadership role. SLC projects further enhance computing efficacy through handson, self-guided experiences with short-term goals [Rit10, Zel00, Mar06].
Leadership qualities are needed to turn technical excellence into innovation and
discovery. As in the EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program [Coy05], the
SLC’s self-led team approach develops both leadership and teamwork skills. The STARS Tiered
Mentoring program builds leadership skills and community while supporting college adjustment,
GPA, retention, graduation and career preparation [Tho05, Sey98, Cha00]. The SLC develops
communication skills through required oral and written presentations. These soft skills are
important in developing commitment to the computing major and preparing for a career [Tan05].
Civic Engagement describes the core mechanism of the SLC: to engage students and
faculty to solve a common problem: broadening participation in computing. SLC outreach to K16 students, much like ChicTech [Kam04], positions the SLC as leaders and role models for
younger students, providing both recruitment and retention benefits. Opportunities to volunteer
or perform meaningful service are important to more fully engage and retain women and
underrepresented populations [Was06, Coh05, Hor04, Fla04]. When performed with industry,
such BPC efforts help computing programs stay connected to the job market, which can have a
positive effect on gendered attrition [Coh05]. The SLC was designed to augment computing
curricula with opportunities to engage on many levels, with faculty, staff, college students, K-12,
and industry, ultimately impacting student retention and success [Ast00, Chi93, Buc08].
Creating a supportive community and building peer solidarity has been linked to strong
academic performance for African-American STEM students [Hra99] and female computing
students [Coh05]. Research shows that higher student retention rates and satisfaction,
particularly among minority students, result from the existence of a community of “like” students
to support the development of a student’s identity [Coh05, Blu05, Tho05, Sel98]. However, the
representation of some demographic populations is so small within an institution, it is difficult to
foster communities of “like” students. The SLC builds a community of practice that uses
computing to give back. Communities of practice share a common identity, a common set of
experiences and knowledge base, and a similar set of explicit, intentional values [Wen06].
Communities of practice promote innovation in industry [Bro91], and increase learning in higher
education [Hez05]. Our diverse STARS SLC students and faculty identify with being leaders
who use computing to contribute to society, increasing computing commitment and identity.
The STARS Values all promote both student and faculty advancement through
developing individual potential and identity in computing. The STARS Leadership Corps must
include faculty role models who can inspire our college students to reach out and include a
broader audience in computing [Pea90]. Their purposeful mentorship to broaden participation
can make the difference in reducing gendered attrition [Coh05]. However, underrepresented
faculty face several challenges to advancement. Faculty women are more likely to experience
inequities in salary [AAUP06, Fog03], other rewards [McE92], power [Str05], voice [Den93], and
in balancing work/family obligations [Spa04]. Mentors and networks are crucial for successful
academic careers, but women receive less mentoring than do men, and this effect worsens for
minority women [Moo90]. The networks that women form are not as effective for career
advantages [Mar06]. Compared to men, women teach more, perform more service, and
consequently, may publish less [Dub97]. Research productivity is related to laboratory space,
teaching and service loads, initial startup packages, access to mentors, and informal networks.
Studies find that women have less access to these resources and, consequently, show less
scholarly productivity than male peers—other factors being equal [Spa00]. As part of the
STARS Leadership Corps, underrepresented faculty can formally address the challenges they
face and seek help through mentoring or other leadership projects that benefit their careers.
17
3.4 Dissemination
Starsalliance.org will continue to be the center for STARS dissemination, but will be enhanced
by our online social network and the SLC Practices Collection in the BPC Portal digital library.
The SLC will use the online social network for informal sharing of resources and experiences,
and the digital library will formally archive SLC practices. We will continue to publish STARS
outcomes via conferences (e.g., SIGCSE, ASEE, FIE), events (e.g., Grace Hopper, Tapia, BPC
Community meetings), and journals (Computer Science Education, IEEE Transactions on
Education, the Journal of Engineering Education). SLC faculty and students will continue to
disseminate STARS results at their universities, while the STARS Advisory Board and partners
will share practices with their organizations. We will continue leading the effort to establish an
ACM Special Interest Group on Broadening Participation (SIGBP) and plan to leverage this
group to broaden participation in the STARS Celebration throughout the nation.
4. Partnership Plan, New Members, and Budget Summary
Table 4.1 lists key roles and personnel. The newly formed STARS Advisory Board will build
national partnerships and advise the Executive Steering Committee (ESC) through fall and
spring teleconferences and meetings at the STARS Celebration. The ESC will continue to direct
STARS activities through monthly teleconferences and an annual meeting at the Celebration.
New Affinity Groups (AGs) will foster collaboration among people with mutual interests,
including DP Leaders (TREU, Mentoring, Pair Programming), SLC Leaders, High School
Outreach, and New Members. Academic Liaisons will engage in the STARS Community by
joining or leading AGs. Affinity Groups will meet via separate teleconferences and Celebration
meetings, and AG Leaders will serve on the ESC. The Evaluation Team will continue to meet
weekly and will present a progress report to the ESC, AL group, and the Advisory Board at the
STARS Celebration.
Table 4.1 STARS Scaling Project Roles & Responsibilities
Role(s)
Online
Community &
Dissemination
People and Responsibilities
Tiffany Barnes, Kim Buch, Audrey Rorrer and Heather Lipford (new) (UNCC); Two graduate
assistants; SLC student evaluators from each STARS school; Three-person External Review
Panel: Instrument development, data collection, analysis (see section 5).
Teresa Dahlberg will serve as initial Project Director. During Year 1, a full-time Project Director will
be hired to manage day-to-day operations of project activities with direction from the STARS
Executive Steering Committee.
Chair: Teresa Dahlberg. Members: Tiffany Barnes, Jason Black (FAMU), Anthony Chow (UNCG),
Scott McCrickard (VT), Heather Lipford, Jean Muhammed (Hampton), Cheryl Seals (Auburn), Nate
Thomas (USFP), Mladen Vouk (NCSU), Kera Watkins (GSU): Provide strategic direction and
programmatic oversight for Scaling project, including: guide project director, award SLC stipends,
organize STARS Celebration, grow STARS Community, and lead initial set of Affinity Groups.
One faculty member from each STARS school: Interface between school and STARS Community,
request SLC and STARS Celebration support, oversee data collection, SLC implementation and
institutionalization, with help from SLC & Faculty Leaders at their school.
Advisory Board members are BPC leaders and experts (see letters): Brian Blake, Barbara Bogue,
Tracy Camp, Priscilla Cohen, Gerry Dozier, Juan Gilbert, Richard Ladner and Telle Whitney:
Guide national STARS Community engagement and partnership development and provide external
advisors for the STARS Scaling Project and its evaluation.
Heather Lipford and graduate assistant: Implement the STARS online social network to grow and
assess the STARS Community, maintain the STARS Alliance web portal, and oversee usage of the
STARS Practices digital library.
Celebration
Organization
Karen Bean (UNCC): Event planning for the STARS Celebration; manage requests and awards of
Celebration travel scholarships and SLC participant stipends.
Demonstration
Project
Coordinators
Tiffany Barnes, Nathan Thomas (USFP) Laurie Williams (NCSU): Lead and evaluate STARS
TREU, Mentoring, and Pair Programming demonstration projects, respectively, with SLC
participant stipends to support the Faculty Leaders who adopt the projects at their school.
STARS
Institute
Teresa Dahlberg, Larry Dennis (FSU), Telle Whitney (as advisory), consultant: Create STARS
Institute nonprofit, growth of STARS Sponsorship and Development (section 3.2.2, last bullet).
Evaluation
Team
Project
Management
Executive
Steering
Committee
Academic
Liaisons (AL)
Advisory
Board
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We will follow the process that we established with the STARS Extension project for
competitive selection of new member schools. Potential new members submit an application
outlining SLC goals, existing synergistic BPC activities, regional partners, department
demographics, and a letter from
Table 4.2: Sixteen Potential New STARS Members
the computing department chair
Research
or dean with specific plans to
University of Illinois–Ur Champaign IL
Public
provide faculty time to lead the
Illinois Institute of Technology
IL
Private
SLC and to institutionalize multiLoyola University
IL
Private
year participation in the SLC.
1
CO
Colorado School of Mines
Public
Table 4.2 lists the colleges and
1
IN
University of Notre Dame
Private
universities who intend to apply
1,2
NC
UNC Greensboro
Public
for STARS membership for the
1
Public- HBCU
SC
South Carolina State University
first year of the Scaling project.
Masters, Undergraduate or Two Year
See attached letters. We will
1,2
SC
Winthrop University
Public
Public- HBCU
VA
selectively add ten new member
Norfolk State University
Public-HBCU
GA
Fort Valley State University
schools in year one, and 20 more
1
NM
New
Mexico
Institute
of
Mn
&
Tech
Public
over years 2-5 (Table 4.3a).
1
Public-HBCU
TX
Prairie
View
A&M
University
Current STARS members
OK
Seminole
State
College
2
year
Public
will continue participation in the
1,
2
WI
Saint
Norbert
College
Private
STARS Community. Some will
FL
Florida
State
College
–
2
year
Public
request support for travel to the
FL
Northwest
Florida
State
College
Public
STARS Celebration or SLC
1. Faculty have previously attended the STARS Celebration
participation (as per Table 3.4,
2. Faculty were former SLC grad students at STARS member
and attached letters).
The STARS Scaling
Project budget of $3.75 million will support and assess 50 schools (30 new), 900 SLC
participants (2 semesters), 1,000 STARS Celebration participants, 61 stipends for Mentoring,
pair programming, or TREU adopters, and 25 Regional Events. In comparison, the current
STARS grants provide 20% more funding to support and assess fewer schools, the same
number of SLC2 and Celebration participants (no K-12 assessment), ~40% fewer Mentoring, PP
and TREU adopters, and no Regional Events. The STARS Scaling budget further supports the
creation of an online social network and digital SLC Practices Collection, and establishment and
growth of the STARS Institute non-profit to sustain the STARS Community and Celebration. A
detailed table of annual stipend allocation is provided in the budget justification.
The budget reflects our commitment to support individuals to advance themselves and
others through BPC. Just over half of the budget is for participant stipends (Celebration, SLC,
faculty advancement, demonstration projects); ~27% for personnel (evaluation, project
management, online community and portal); ~2% is for travel and software tools; and ~20% is
for fringe and overhead.
5. Evaluation Plan
The STARS Evaluation Team seeks to build capacity in BPC evaluation research, provide
STARS leadership with frequent insight into progress, and determine the real effects of the
STARS Alliance on individuals, universities, and the STARS community.
The STARS Scaling Project evaluation methodology, shown in Table 5.1, is guided by
Daniel Stufflebeam’s Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model [Stu02], which is widely
used for formative and summative assessment of K-16 educational projects. Using this model,
evaluators record and assess: Context – the larger setting of the project; Input – all crucial
2
Note that during the first seven semesters (2006-2009) we have supported 687 SLC participants for an average of 2.3 semesters
each. For comparison, this equates to 802 SLC participants for 2 semesters each.
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project staff, materials, and resources; Process – project strategies, activities, and procedures,
including formative evaluation for operational refinement; and Product – the ultimate result
obtained that can be attributed to project interventions, including summative evaluation to
determine overall project success. We routinely integrate both qualitative and quantitative
assessments to improve STARS Alliance outcomes and build capacity [Mil00]. We engage and
develop key leaders, including faculty and department chairs, and measure their support for
change as a contextual and formative measure. We intentionally engage SLC students, faculty,
and the Alliance Steering Committee in evaluation through web 2.0 technologies for real-time
collaboration, activity reporting, management, and data collection. These tools allow us to
monitor the organizational environment, develop accountability, and provide formative feedback
through identifying successes and lessons learned.
Table 5.1: Assessment Objectives, Activities, Measures and Data Collection
Goals & Desired Outcomes
Goal 1: Recruitment
Increased computing
enrollments & awareness
Goal 2: Bridging
Increased interest &
enrollments in computing
graduate programs
Goal 3: Retention
Increased GPA, computing
efficacy & graduation
Goal 4: Advancement
Increased computing faculty
research/grant scholarship,
support for faculty tenure &
promotion
Goal 5: Sustainability
Sustained Alliance training,
efficacy & partnerships
Goal 6: Dissemination
Improved BPC & research
community that promotes
awareness & adoption of
effective STARS practices
Goal 7: Scaling
National SLC adoption and
institutionalization; national
engagement in STARS
Celebration; regional
Celebrations
Activities
Example Measures
-SLC Outreach
-Mentoring
-SLC-REU experience
-SLC Leadership
projects
-Pair programming
-Mentoring
-SLC-REU experience
-STARS Celebration
-online social network
-Affinity Groups
- Research circles
- Mentoring
-Pub/proposal writing
-Career workshops
-Affinity Groups
-STARS nonprofit
-Institutionalizing SLC
-SLC Repositories
-Online social network
-SLC Repositories
-Publications
-Advisory Board
-Online social network
-STARS web portal
-STARS Celebration
- # SLC participants
- # K-16 outreach participants
- College & K-12 computing attitudes
- # STARS publications, presentations
- College control group comparison
- Computing attitude scale
- REU participation and publications
- Identity development scale; GPA
- Social, academic, & psychosocial
development & satisfaction scales
- Online social network collaboration
- # faculty participants
- # faculty retained, # promoted
- # faculty computing publications
- Mentoring productivity
- Faculty Career satisfaction scale
- # SLC courses, clubs and
- # institutionalized SLC practices
- Size of SLC practices collection
- Organizational Efficacy scale
- Size of SLC practices collection
- # pubs, presentations, posters
- Advisory board participation
- Social network and web portal activity
- # STARS Celebration attendees,
sessions, and workshops
- # STARS Community Members
- # SLC practices adopted
- # STARS Celebration attendees
- # SLC aligned with courses, clubs, …
- # STARS Regional events
- STARS nonprofit funding
-SLC Repositories
-Participant Stipends
-STARS Celebration
-Online social network
-Affinity Groups
Data
-Pre-post test
-Interviews
-Participation
-Applications
-Enrollment
-Longitudinal
-Surveys
-Interviews
-Publications
-Promotions
-Institutional
Scorecards
-Use of SLC
Repositories
-Online social
network use
-Dept. chair
interviews
-Annual
reports
-Steering
committee
meeting
minutes
We will continue to evaluate the Alliance impact on individuals and institutions for
recruitment, bridging, and retention of computing students, and STARS computing faculty
advancement. We will continue summative research publications [e.g., Bell09, Boy10, Boy09
Dah10, Dah09] to support sustainability and dissemination, while our formative surveys,
interviews, and novel institutional scorecards will help guide future Alliance activities.
Our current evaluation of SLC K-12 Outreach is limited to participation because of the
need to obtain parental consent. We will continue this practice for one-time events, like
classroom visits, where participants would be enthusiastic about computing for a short time but
lasting behavior changes were unlikely. However, long-term outreach such as a 10-week
Citizen Schools after-school program may have considerable impact on K-12 students.
20
Therefore, we will provide the SLC with tools and support to assess the impact of long-term K12 outreach on students’ attitudes and intentions.
To assess national scaling, we will develop new measures such as Alliance members
and partnerships; curricular reform; and participation in the BPC digital library and the STARS
social network. As we refine and improve our STARS evaluation materials, we will make them
publicly available through the BPC digital library. To better understand the impact of STARS, we
will compare STARS recruitment, bridging and retention measures with national indicators
such as the HERI undergraduate studies [HERI], National Education Longitudinal study [NELS],
Baccalaureate & Beyond Longitudinal study [BBLS], National Association of Colleges &
Employers study [NACE], and Taulbee report [TAUL09]. We will compare faculty advancement
measures to the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty results [NSOPF].
Tiffany Barnes (Associate Professor, Computer Science), Kim Buch (Associate
Professor, Psychology), and Audrey Rorrer (Research Scientist, Counseling) will continue as
the Evaluation Team. As a co-founder of the STARS Alliance, Tiffany Barnes coordinates
evaluation logistics and insures alignment with STARS activities. With much prior experience
evaluating STEM consortiums, Kim Buch serves as lead evaluator and provides perspective
from an external discipline. As lead Evaluation Research Scientist in the UNC Charlotte
Diversity in IT Institute, Audrey Rorrer directs STARS survey administration, data collection,
analysis, and reporting. We will continue to build capacity for evaluation by developing
students as Evaluation Research Assistants at each STARS member school. These SLC
students will perform STARS BPC research projects such as conducting and analyzing student
interviews, and collecting and reporting SLC activities to the STARS evaluation team.
Heather Lipford (Assistant Professor, Software & Information Systems) will lead the
implementation and evaluation of the STARS online social networking site. Nate Thomas and
Laurie Williams will continue assessment for the STARS Mentoring and Pair Programming
demonstration projects. Tiffany Barnes and Audrey Rorrer will assess the new TREU DP.
During the first four years, the STARS Alliance underwent two Site Visits – one arranged
by NSF and another that we arranged ourselves. For each, a panel of three experts provided a
detailed review of alliance goals, activities, outcomes and evaluation methodology. These
reviews provided valuable formative feedback that has guided our activities. Therefore, we will
continue to hold these reviews every year, beginning in year 2 of the Scaling project. The
review panel will include Barbara Bogue, who served on both of the prior STARS Site Visits and
Brian Blake, who served on the most recent visit. (See Bogue and Blake letters of
collaboration.) We will include one or two visiting panelists each year for a fresh perspective.
6. Conclusion
Our research and evaluation demonstrate that participation in the STARS Leadership Corps is
resulting in statistically significant increases in leading indicators of student retention;
enhancements in student enrollment and graduation; advancement of under-represented
faculty; and improvement in computing department climate. Furthermore, we are solving the
biggest challenge for BPC, on our campuses, by leveraging SLC curricular programs to sustain
great BPC programs beyond the funding cycle. The STARS Scaling Project will enable the 20
STARS colleges and universities to deepen our impact through multi-year SLC and to transfer
our practices and outcomes to 30 new schools. The viral impact of the STARS Scaling project
will touch hundreds of faculty, thousands of college students, and tens of thousands of K-12
students during the timeframe of the five year project. More importantly, the Scaling project will
enable us to grow a STARS Community that is sustained through a nonprofit and validated
through assessment of 50 institutions to continue propagating the viral reach of the STARS
Community beyond 2016.
21