Exploring How Computing Courses Contribute to Sense of Belonging

Sense of belonging correlates with retention rates for university-level students especially for those in their earlier years [5, 9, 10] and for those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and computing majors [2, 8]. In computing, women and students of color (i.e., Black, Latinx, and Indigenous) tend to report lower sense of belonging compared to men [6, 7]. Unfortunately, we lack consensus on how sense of belonging should be defined, and why students come to feel like they do or do not belong. Past definitions (e.g., [3, 4] help identify educational contexts and students’ feelings, they do not necessarily provide coherent insights into why students develop these feelings.

Allen et al. [1] developed a conceptual framework that proposes four components that lead to a sense of belonging: competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions. They identified these components through a broad literature review inclusive of educational psychology, clinical psychology, sociology, and other fields. While this work advances our understanding of why someone may develop a sense of belonging, this framework has not been applied to technical or computing contexts. We aim to fill these gaps in the literature by interviewing students who are taking required computer science courses to explore the ways in which their descriptions of their course experiences align with, challenge, or expand upon this framework.

To this end, we ask the following research question:

RQ: To what extent is Allen et al.’s framework helpful in understanding how students describe their sense of belonging in required computing courses?

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 students from two required, upper-level computing courses. Both courses are typically taken by second year computer science majors, and are also open to other engineering majors. The first two authors qualitatively analyzed interview transcripts using two rounds of coding.

Our results provide evidence supporting the conceptual framework. Additionally, examples from our participant showed nuance in how the four components manifest in computing courses. More specifically, participants expressed strong academic motivations to belong in their courses, whereas social motivations to belong existed outside of their courses. To achieve these academic motivations, participants used opportunities inside and outside of courses to find community in computing. However, access to such opportunities varied widely across courses and participants’ existing peer relationships. Within these opportunities, our participants placed emphasis on technical competencies (e.g., understanding course material) alongside social competencies (e.g., being inclusive of others). In addition to general feelings of inclusion, our participants describe other perceptions, such as self-efficacy and psychological safety, emerging from motivations to connect with others, opportunities to do so, and competencies to make the most of those opportunities.

Importantly, our results point to potential inequities in belonging. For example, students with existing communities within computing may have more opportunities to belong compared to students without; however, course structures and policies (e.g., using randomized groups) may level the playing field.

We suggest future research should explore to what degree these components are or are not present, as well as how the presence of these components may vary across demographic groups.