Exploring Computing Students' Sense of Belonging Before and After a Collaborative Learning Course
Prior work has found that women tend to report lower sense of belonging compared to men in STEM and computing contexts, which may discourage women’s persistence. Collaborative learning has been shown to improve students’ sense of belonging in some STEM and computing courses relative to traditional lecturing; however, these studies tend to focus on a single course or the first implementation of such pedagogical changes. Our study explores whether these trends generalize by measuring students’ sense of belonging across three non-introductory computing courses that have consistently used collaborative learning activities over three semesters. We ask the following research question: Is collaborative learning generally associated with an increased sense of belonging, especially for women? We found that while there were variations across courses, students’ reported sense of belonging improved in all courses. Notably, women’s reported sense of belonging improved 43% more than men’s in the study. Our findings complement prior studies by providing evidence of a relationship between increased sense of belonging and collaborative learning, and suggest students’ sense of belonging is malleable beyond the first year. These findings challenge critiques of past studies as being isolated to single courses or conducted only immediately after an effort to change a course, suggesting pedagogical changes may hold promise in improving students’ affective outcomes.
Fri 22 MarDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
10:45 - 12:00 | Persistence in CS and RetentionPapers at Meeting Room D135 Chair(s): Jennifer Wong-Ma University of California, Irvine | ||
10:45 25mTalk | What factors influence persistence in project-based programming courses at community colleges? Papers Chris Bogart Carnegie Mellon University, Marshall An Carnegie Mellon University, Eric Keylor Carnegie Mellon University, Pawanjeet Singh Carnegie Mellon University, Jaromir Savelka Carnegie Mellon University, Majd Sakr Carnegie Mellon University DOI | ||
11:10 25mTalk | A Longitudinal Study of the Relationship between Early Undergraduate Research and Academic Outcomes in Computer Science Papers Kamen Redfield University of California, San Diego, Sukham Sidhu University of California, San Diego, Zackary Glazewski University of California, Santa Barbara, Cynthia Bailey Stanford University, Diba Mirza University of California Santa Barbara, Christine Alvarado University of California San Diego DOI | ||
11:35 25mTalk | Exploring Computing Students' Sense of Belonging Before and After a Collaborative Learning Course Papers Morgan Fong University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Shan Huang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Abdussalam Alawini University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Mariana Silva University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Geoffrey Herman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DOI |