Harvey Mudd College computer science major An Nguyen \u201922 received an award for Best Paper (CS education research track) from SIGCSE 2020 Technical Symposium judges. <\/p>\n
Co-authored by computer science professor Colleen Lewis, Nguyen\u2019s paper is titled \u201cCompetitive Enrollment Policies in Computing Departments Negatively Predict First-Year Students\u2019 Sense of Belonging, Self-Efficacy, and Perception of Department.\u201d <\/p>\n
As computer science becomes a more popular area of study, institutions have responded by enacting competitive enrollment processes. However, little is known about the effects of enrollment policies on students\u2019 experiences and retention.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo identify relationships between those policies and students\u2019 experiences, we linked survey data from 1,245 first-year students in 80 CS departments to a dataset of department policies,\u201d says Nguyen. \u201cWe found that competitive enrollment negatively predicts first-year students\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Future research will include interviewing faculty and administrators to more accurately classify department policies and to examine how first-year students\u2019 experiences change over time following a change in enrollment policy at an institution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Harvey Mudd College computer science major An Nguyen \u201922 received an award for Best Paper (CS education research track) from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":8183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,26,30],"class_list":["post-8182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computer-science","category-faculty","category-research","category-students"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}