Team profile by members of the Understanding Undergraduate Computing Student Perceptions of Race project team

Computer science (CS) continues to struggle to foster identity-inclusive courses, departments and organizational cultures for non-dominant identities, particularly for Black, Indigenous and Hispanic/Latinx individuals. While there have been several efforts designed to change the field, research has shown that historically marginalized students in computing continue to have negative experiences in these spaces, such as experiencing racial microaggressions and stereotype threat. However, no systematic accounting for undergraduate students’ perceptions, understandings and experiences of race within the computing context has been undertaken.

With this in mind, our Bass Connections team has sought to answer two research questions:

1. How do CS undergraduate students perceive race in university computing departments?
2. What factors influence CS undergraduate students’ understanding of and experiences with race in the context of computing departments?

In 2022-2023, our Bass Connections team designed and implemented a national survey that elicited over 550 responses from students from 50 unique institutions. The team further collected 46 follow-up interviews with students from various backgrounds. For the 2023-2024 academic year, we analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data from this work and made several important discoveries.

First, we found that computing students’ experiences discussing race before college were related to their attitudes toward race and privilege in computing spaces, both within the academy and in professional computing environments. These findings could inform guidelines and professional development aimed at helping faculty and administrators facilitate constructive race dialogues with students.

To share the findings of this work, the team participated in the Bass Connections Poster Showcase in April 2024. Further, two undergraduate members of our team will present this work, which is being published in the American Society for Engineering Education, in Portland, Oregon, in June 2024.

Second, further analyses of the interview data revealed that computing students who did not spend their formative years in the United States had vastly different conversations about race before coming to college and, similarly, had very different perspectives on race and racial bias in computing than did U.S.-based students.

These findings complicate existing conversations about diversity, equity, inclusion and the path forward in computing, suggesting further research that delves deeper into the cross sections of students’ backgrounds and their perceptions of race is needed. These findings are also being presented this summer by one of our graduate students and one of our postdocs at the American Sociological Association meetings in Montreal, Canada, in August 2024.

Overall, we are continuing to work to identify students’ perceptions and experiences of race and racial bias and their impacts to advocate for and better address equity issues in computing.

The Role of Student Backgrounds in Understanding Racial Disparities in Computing

Poster by Jabari Kwesi, Elyse McFalls, Reagan Razon, Alexandra Thursland, Fatima Fairfax, Alex Rogers, A. Nicki Washington, Crystal E. Peoples, Brean Prefontaine, Shaundra B. Daily and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva