We (Brett Becker and Catherine Mooney) are just “back” from the 25th Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), an A-ranked conference that was held virtually on June 17 and 18.
We presented a poster entitled “Exploring Sense of Belonging in Computer Science Students” which won the best poster award. This poster, co-authored by UCD CS PhD students Anna Antoniadi and Ioannis Karvelas as well as UCD Physics PhD student Lana Salmon, explored the relationship between sense of belonging and participation in networking, outreach and mentoring activities.
Student sense of belonging has been shown to be associated with many attributes such as motivation and persistence. However, sense of belonging can show variations according to factors such as race and gender. In this study, we examined the relationship between undergraduate Computer Science students’ participation in networking, outreach, and mentoring activities and their sense of belonging. Results revealed lower levels of sense of belonging in women and self-identified minorities. However, we observed a higher sense of belonging in female students who participated in networking, outreach, and mentoring activities.
Overall these results will help us towards understanding what makes CS students feel included and what can be done to help those that don’t.
— Catherine Mooney
[pdf-embedder url=”https://lisda.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ITiCSE_2020_388.pdf”]