Encourage Persistence

National Center for Women & Information Technology

PROMISING

PRACTICES

K-12 Education Undergraduate Career Graduate Academic Career

Encourage Persistence Compelling Education: K-12 and Early Computing Concepts Examples From Academia An example of encouraging students comes from a faculty member who described how simple it is for him. “It just takes me going to them and saying, “You do better than you think you do, so keep trying.” From a student’s perspective, having her faculty member say, “Just keep at it. You can do it,” helped her persist when she had self-doubt. Simple though encouragement is, fewer than half of the faculty members in the average computer science department in the United States say they do it. At a time when computer science was a very popular major (19962000), instructors were more likely to want students to drop their course than to persist. In fact, one example of discouragement was the professor who urged his students to drop his course by describing how difficult the course was going to be and offering an incentive of one dollar to any student who left. The glut of students has gone, but the average faculty member may still not encourage student persistence.

Faculty resistance to offering encouragement was explained in the following way during a 2005 telephone interview: [Encouragement is] not my job. I am not here to be their mother. I am here to teach them. The material is all the encouragement they need. Women can make it in this field just as much as men can. They just can’t act like girls. If they are feeling like they need extra sympathy, they’re not getting it from me. I don’t see men asking for this. These girls just need to grow up. I think they can learn a lot from the men. … I tell students if I think that they are in over their heads. Some respond positively to this, others leave. It’s not my fault though. I don’t have to encourage them to stay. I sometimes encourage them to leave. Like this instructor, some faculty members do not view encouragement as part of their role. Instead of cultivating student success, they focus on deterring students who seem unsuitable or uncertain, but they may mistake lack of confidence for lack of ability. Because women in computing are more likely than men to experience a crisis of confidence, encouraging them to persist is especially important for overcoming disproportionate attrition.

Examples From The Workforce

Encouragement also seems to be underutilized in the workforce. Results from Gallup Poll reported in 2004 indicate that praise is a rare experience for most employees. Only 35% of U.S. workers were recognized for their work in the past year. Bandura argues that verbally persuading someone they have the capabilities to master a task results in greater and more effort to complete that task. This assertion has been widely tested and confirmed as an element of various forms of work team and organizational leadership, including transformational leadership and empowerment. One example of supportive evidence comes from a 2005 Gallup poll that found supervisor focus on employee strengths was positively associated with employees who “drive innovation and move the organization forward” (Krueger and Killham, 2005). This finding is illustrated in the graph to the left from the Gallup Organization, and it supports their conclusion that praise contributes to reduced turnover and improved productivity, profit, and innovation.

Why Encourage Persistence? Why encourage persistence?

Anyone who has participated in sports or physical training knows the positive effects of encouragement. Research in sports medicine has measured the substantial improvements in effort and persistence that result from frequent exhortations like, “Great job!” and “Keep going!” Whether it works through positive reinforcement or instructions, this type of communication motivates people to work at a task harder and longer, so it can be a powerful tool in an overall effort to bring gender balance to computing. In workforce settings, career encouragement promotes women’s training and development, which is linked with managerial advancement. In academic settings, where women in computer science set higher standards for themselves than men do, encouragement from faculty members helps retain women in undergraduate computer science at the same rates as their male classmates. In addition to retention, women’s participation could even increase through encouragement, because women are more likely than men to say they entered the field as a result of encouragement from a teacher, family member, or friend.

How to encourage persistence

Everyone knows how to encourage others. It involves expressing positive, supportive, motivational sentiments. Tips provided online from WriteExpress for writing “encouragement letters” recommend the following: TM

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Focus on what has been or could be accomplished, and keep your tone positive Express genuine appreciation Avoid strong language that could be discouraging Offer your help Written encouragement is particularly needed after a disappointment or setback. It is particularly motivational after successful completion of a task.

Unmentioned, but fundamental to these recommendations is that communicating encouragement should be personal. It need not be private; however, public encouragement may be particularly effective. Additional features of effective encouragement that are relevant to encouragement in the form of praise include:

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Be sincere and be specific. Include descriptive information about the action or product you are praising.

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Provide comparative information to make it clear how the performance compares with other performances.

Focus on the elements of performance over which the performer has control, rather than element over which he or she has no control.

ENCOURAGING WORDS COUNTER LOW CONFIDENCE Encouragement increases self-efficacy (belief in one’s ability to successfully perform a task). Because we are more likely to engage in tasks that we believe we can perform successfully, encouragement may be especially useful in male-stereotyped fields such as computing, which is marked by men’s over-confidence and women’s underconfidence. In this context, words of encouragement from supervisors and instructors increase women’s entry and persistence by raising their self-efficacy. Encouraging persistence is a simple practice that requires no additional resources. It is typically an element of mentoring, but there is no reason to restrict encouragement to the context of a mentoring relationship. Opportunities for offering encouragement abound during the normal course of daily interaction. It requires only a commitment to cultivating outstanding performance through positive communication. Encouragement is essential to retention when women express doubts about whether they belong in computing. At this point, the instructor/supervisor response can make the difference between women’s persistence and departure. An understanding and accepting response facilitates departure, whereas a sincere encouraging response that expresses confidence in the student/ employee’s ability to succeed and recommends her persistence facilitates retention.

National Center for Women & Information Technology

Revolutionizing the Face of Technology L e c ia J . B a r k e r and J. McGr ath C ohoon, author s www. nc w i t.o r g • N a ti o n a l C e n te r for Women & Informati on Technol ogy • copyri ght 2007

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