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News Consumption Among CS Majors: Habits, Perceptions, and Challenges

Published: 12 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Improved pedagogy is urgently needed that helps computer science majors better recognize how their products will affect societies where computing is increasingly permeating all aspects of life. A more suitable approach than frequently updating materials to reflect the effect of rapidly changing computing paradigms on continuously evolving societies is to integrate the assessment of current events into the classroom and coursework. Because current events evolve so quickly, often the only source of information is the news media for which trustworthiness and accuracy have become complex issues. To accurately target instructional changes that account for both the benefits and challenges of incorporating news reporting, instructors must first understand how computer science majors consume news. Unfortunately, research addressing the habits and perceptions of computer science students when consuming news reporting is limited. To help fill this gap, we present results from a survey investigating the method, frequency, and perceptions of news consumption among CS majors at a primarily undergraduate university in the United States. We also report if students appreciate the effect of computing on current events and provide analysis from investigating the impact of news stories influenced by computing.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACMSE '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Southeast Conference
April 2023
216 pages
ISBN:9781450399210
DOI:10.1145/3564746
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 June 2023

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  1. ethics
  2. computer science education
  3. news literacy

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  • Short-paper

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ACMSE 2023
ACMSE 2023: 2023 ACM Southeast Conference
April 12 - 14, 2023
Virtual Event, USA

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ACMSE '23 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 71 submissions, 44%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 502 of 1,023 submissions, 49%

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