Computer science is a fast-growing field in today's digitized age, and working in this industry often requires creativity and innovative thought. An issue within computer science education, however, is that large introductory programming courses often involve little opportunity for creative thinking within coursework. The undergraduate…

Interdisciplinarity has been touted as a means to recruit more racially and gender-diverse students to computing. In this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study, we investigated demographic characteristics among a sample of undergraduate students pursuing interdisciplinary computing major and minor combinations at 15 institutions in the United…

Two studies investigated change in computer science (CS) students' implicit intelligence beliefs. Across both studies, we found that the strength of incremental and entity beliefs changed across time. In Study 1, we found that incremental beliefs decreased and entity beliefs increased across the semester. Change in implicit intelligence beliefs…

Background and Context. Computing is considered a fundamental skill for civic engagement, self-expression, and employment opportunity. Despite this, there exist significant equity gaps in post-secondary computing enrollment and retention. Specifically, in the California State University (CSU) system, which serves close to half a million…

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of…

Assessment plays an important role in education and can both guide and motivate learning. Assessment can, however, be carried out with different aims: providing the students with feedback that supports the learning (formative assessment) and judging to which degree the students have fulfilled the intended learning outcomes (summative assessment).…

Computer science (CS) has been identified as one of the fastest-growing professions, with demand for CS professionals far outpacing the supply of CS graduates. The necessity for a trained CS workforce has compelled industry and academia to evaluate strategies for broadening participation in CS. The current literature in CS education emphasizes the…

Despite the critical societal importance of computer security, security is not well integrated into the undergraduate computing curriculum. Security classes and tracks treat security issues as separable topics as opposed to fundamental issues that pervade all aspects of software development. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on security…

Many people are first exposed to code through web development, yet little is known about the barriers beginners face in these formative experiences. In this article, we describe a study of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory web development course taken by both computing majors and general education students. Using data collected…