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Sufficiently serving computer science students at minority-serving institutions entails systematic communication of the "hidden curriculum"- the unwritten rules and tacit norms of traversing a disciplinary academic space- knowledge that students might learn from those with college-going backgrounds. At Kean University, department-run new student orientation has become a mechanism for integrating new students into the institution and the computer science department's community. The course addressed what Kezar and Holcombe call "Elements of STEM student success," or the needs of students at the intersection of first-generation familial experiences and STEM student college newcomers. In this work-in-progress experience report, we use data from retrospective pre-post surveys to show that student participants in the orientation indicate greater intent to engage in high-impact practices, greater confidence in their major choice, and strong identification with their STEM discipline. The authors discuss how systemic, department-level orientation processes at institutions that serve underrepresented student populations can impart academic and career path blueprints that move beyond institutional retention and improve equitable advancements in computing.
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Experiences of Computer Science Transfer Students
About half of recent computer and information science graduates attended community college at some point. Prior work on transfer students in general suggests that the transfer process can engage people from underrepresented communities, but can also be academically and socially "shocking". However, we know little about the experiences of transfer students in computer science in particular. We used the Laanan-Transfer Student Questionnaire (L-TSQ) to survey 25 transfer students and 135 native (non-transfer) students and conducted follow-up interviews with 8 transfer students attending a large public 4-year university in a city with significant technology industry presence. We found that while transfer students were more diverse demographically, the support of the university for transfer student orientation tended to mitigate social shocks of transferring. This did not, however, eliminate gaps in academic performance. These findings suggest that there are other non-social factors that influence academic performance that CS programs must support to equitably engage students who transfer.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735123
- PAR ID:
- 10107743
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM International Computing Education Research Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 115 to 123
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3230977.3231004
