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Enrollment in computing at the college level has skyrocketed, and many institutions have responded by enacting competitive enrollment processes. However, little is known about the effects of enrollment policies on students' experiences. To identify relationships between those policies and students' experiences, we linked survey data from 1245 first-year students in 80 CS departments to a dataset of department policies. We found that competitive enrollment negatively predicts first-year students' perception of the computing department as welcoming, their sense of belonging, and their self-efficacy in computing. Both belonging and self-efficacy are known predictors of student retention in CS. In addition, these relationships are stronger for students without pre-college computing experience. Our classification of institutions as competitive is conservative, and false positives are likely. This biases our results and suggests that the negative relationships we found are an underestimation of the effects of competitive enrollment.
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Proposing, Planning, and Teaching an Equity- and Justice-Centered Secondary Pre-Service CS Teacher Education Program
Teachers are essential to equitably broadening participation in computing in schools, but the creation of CS teacher education pathways faces many challenges. In this experience report, we share the many political, administrative, institutional, and sustainability barriers our institution faced in creating a secondary CS pre-service pathway. Throughout, we discuss the particular design choices we made in order to center equity and justice, both in the content of the program, but also in its structure, policies, and resources, which were often in tension with state standards and policies. We also describe our experience teaching and supporting the inaugural cohort of graduates as well as the graduates' experiences, which revealed tension between utopian and dystopian futures of computing and their role in helping students navigate them. We end with a reflection on key factors that we believe led to its successful first year launch, including leadership, interdisciplinarity, capacity, timing, and funding, and on sustainability concerns, including tuition subsidy and instructional capacity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2031265
- PAR ID:
- 10432795
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 583 to 589
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569735
