Gender & information & communications technology-A 10-year study of new undergraduates

Conclusion

In terms of the University of Edinburgh, there are lessons for us from our data, plus some insights from recent surveys and interviews we have conducted with various groups around the university.

New students’ reporting of apprehensiveness with respect to use of ICT in their studies has been falling over the years, but now appears to be reaching a stable baseline, perhaps reflecting a group in our population with general apprehensiveness about university life and studies. The steadily rising temale:male ratio in our undergraduate population will tend to exacerbate this issue. One approach which we could take would he to give more information to prospective students about the extent and types of use of ICT in their courses, and to focus in on this topic in the early days and weeks of the first term. Another approach is to provide more explicit guidance to students about the sorts and levels of skills we expect graduates to achieve. We know that students leaving the university for professions such as teaching, medicine and law are more confident about the match between their future employers’ needs than are other students, probably because the courses leading to professional qualifications are more explicit than are more “academic” subjects. Provision of materials to enable students to self-assess their skills against objective tasks might enable men and women to become more accurate in their self-reporting of skills. The formal demonstration (even to oneself) of one’s ICT skills may be more of a support to the technological confidence of women than of men. Although the point applies equally to any students who are anxious about their skills in this domain: self assessment is more important to those low in confidence than to those high in confidence. An example of such objective testing can be found in the European Computer Driving Licence (www.ecdl.org). At present, the university favours integration of ICT skills development into academic studies, which although good for encouraging engagement by its relevance, may well make wider and generic self-assessment more difficult.

Interviews with technical support staff who come into direct contact with students in the university microlabs and who run the voluntary courses provided in the first weeks of the academic year, have provided us with useful insights into gender differences in requests for assistance. Although most students appear to turn first to peers tor help (something we have observed in other studies), females are more willing to ask for assistance, and particularly with technical problems, than are males who may view such difficulties as “something they should be able to solve”. The great majority of our student technical support staff are males, and this in itself may raise barriers for the increasing proportion of female students in the university. Seeking costeffective ways to provide appropriate assistance will continue to be an issue for us over the coming years.