Gender, Feedback, and Learners' Decisions to Share Their Creative Computing Projects

Gender, Feedback, and Learners' Decisions to Share Their Creative Computing Projects

Although informal online learning communities are made possible by users' decisions to share their creations, participation by females and other marginalized groups remains stubbornly low in technical communities. Using descriptive statistics and a unique dataset of shared and unshared projects from over 1.1 million users of Scratch-a collaborative programming community for young people-we show that while girls share less initially, this trend flips among experienced users. Using Bayesian regression analyses, we show that this relationship can largely be attributed to differences in the way boys and girls participate. We also find that while prior positive feedback is correlated with increased sharing among inexperienced users, this effect also reverses with experience or with the addition of controls. Our findings provide a description of the dynamics behind online learners' decisions to share, open new research questions, and point to several lessons for system designers.

虽然用户决定分享自己的创作使得非正式的在线学习社区成为可能，但在技术社区中，女性和其他边缘化群体的参与率仍然极低。通过使用描述性统计数据以及来自Scratch（一个面向年轻人的协作编程社区）110多万用户的共享和未共享项目的独特数据集，我们发现，虽然女孩最初分享得较少，但在有经验的用户中，这一趋势发生了逆转。通过贝叶斯回归分析，我们表明这种关系在很大程度上可归因于男孩和女孩参与方式的差异。我们还发现，虽然先前的积极反馈与缺乏经验的用户增加分享相关，但这种影响也会随着经验的增加或控制变量的加入而逆转。我们的研究结果描述了在线学习者决定分享背后的动态，提出了新的研究问题，并为系统设计者提供了一些经验教训。