Despite the proliferation of studies on broadening participation in computing, individuals with disabilities remain relatively less examined. In this study, we use large-scale data to examine the patterns of persistence and major-switching among students with disabilities in undergraduate computing education. Our findings suggest that disabilities discourage students to enter or remain in computing at the intersection of their race and gender. Our study provides insights on the challenges and opportunities students with disabilities face in undergraduate computing education, with implications for increasing their participation and retention.

Conversational programmers have distinct learning goals of improving their communication skills about technical topics, rather than their code-writing skills. However, the predominant instructional approach to computing focuses on writing code, leading to the mismatch in expectations and causing feelings of failure among conversational programmers. My research goal is to understand the learning needs and challenges of conversational programmers at scale and design tailored systems for conversational programmers, ultimately expanding pathways to computing education.

Background and Context. Instruction in most introductory computing courses is typically focused on how to program. However, non-majors who take computing courses have a diverse set of desired endpoints. One group of non-majors are the conversational programmers, who do not want to program in their career but enroll in computing courses to improve their ability to communicate about technical topics and their competitiveness in the job market. Research suggests that these learners need an alternate instructional approach, but so far, conversational programmers in higher educational contexts have only been studied in a limited number of small-scale studies. Objectives. To inform curriculum design for conversational programmers at the university level, we (a) examine the prevalence of conversational programmers among non-majors and their characteristics, (b) understand conversational programmers’ desired learning goals and classroom activities, and (c) investigate factors associated with these learners’ motivation to learn computing. Methods. We designed a survey based on Expectancy-Value Theory and prior work about conversational programmers. We collected responses from randomly sampled non-major students at a large public university, and we analyzed the survey data with descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings. We found that conversational programmers are the largest proportion of non-majors in our sample, both overall and across historically underrepresented groups in CS. We replicated prior findings of low self-efficacy for programming of conversational programmers. We found that conversational programmers’ motivation for taking more computing courses is paradoxically driven more by their interest in computing than its utility, despite their general lack of enjoyment in computing. We validate a previously proposed set of conversational programmers’ learning goals and show that they value employment-oriented learning goals over those focused on conversations. Implications. Our results suggest that addressing the needs of conversational programmers can contribute to broadening participation in computing. Our study motivates a learner-centered curriculum design that could address conversational programmers’ learning needs by enhancing their self-efficacy and interests prior to focusing on conversational goals.

One of the less explored approaches to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in Computer Science (CS) is through changes to the curriculum. Despite sporadic work on the adoption of Culturally Responsive Computing (CRC) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), the inclusion of equity-minded courses, or modifications on specific elements of the curriculum such as introductory programming courses, there has never been a wide exploration or adoption of a successful equity-minded undergraduate CS curriculum.

Existing research has shown that conversational programmers have distinct learning needs from traditional CS major students. As the curriculum objectives of most introductory CS courses are aligned with the learning needs of traditional CS major students, conversational programmers often experience a sense of failure and low self-efficacy in CS courses. In my research, I have extended the current understanding of undergraduate conversational programmers at scale. I further intend to design learning tools for conversational programmers, ultimately contributing to expanding pathways to computing education.