Measuring Students' Sense of Belonging in Introductory CS Courses

Abstract

Prior research has shown that a sense of belonging is very important for students to continue in their field of study. This is particularly true for minoritized students in introductory CS courses. The methods used so far to study sense of belonging in CS have been qualitative or have used a small number of survey items. In this paper, we validate a large 30-item survey originally developed for Mathematics. We collected data from 21 institutions, with 30 faculty and 1165 survey responses. We present a factor analysis for the survey to highlight how it measures factors like 'Membership', 'Acceptance', 'Affect', 'Trust' and 'Desire to Fade'. We measured the students' sense of belonging using the survey and found that it correlates with their learning and their interest to pursue more CS courses. These correlations were nuanced based on students' gender, race, and the type of learning environment. We found that for minoritized students in particular, the interest to pursue CS courses was more correlated with their sense of belonging. A type of learning environment we examined was Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). We studied the differences in sense of belonging between POGIL and non-POGIL classrooms. Although we did not find a significant difference in overall sense of belonging at the factor level, we did find significant differences when we examined at the item level. These results shed light about nuances in students' sense of belonging in CS POGIL classrooms when compared to other approaches.