Measuring the impact of a high school intervention on students' attitudes in information technology: Validation and use of an attitude survey

Attracting and retaining women and minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) fields is a common challenge faced by today's universities. In response, various projects that are underway across the nation seek to increase these groups' interests in and, hopefully, their eventual participation in STEM. A challenge to these efforts has been measuring, in the short term, the impact of educational programs on students' interests with respect to STEM fields. Many of the current attitude surveys are outdated or have limited validity. This paper describes the validation of an attitude survey which was designed to measure high school students' attitudes with respect to the field of information technology (IT). The attitude survey contains two researcher-defined factors: general interest in IT and perception of gender stereotypes in IT. The attitude survey successfully captured differences in students' attitudes across year of program implementation and ethnicity in a high school IT educational program.