Developing and validating a survey for classroom-based sense of belonging in computing

In computing, women, students of color, and non-traditional students (e.g., transfer students, first generation students) tend to report lower sense of belonging compared to men. Gender differences in terms of who fits or who is seen as fitting in STEM and computing (e.g., asocial competitive men) may discourage students from staying in their undergraduate computing programs. To help students from historically underrepresented groups feel like they belong in computing, institutions and instructors have pursued a variety of interventions, such as early extracurricular outreach and residence programs and the use of inclusive pedagogies such as collaborative learning. Despite its importance when studying student motivation and retention, we lack an understanding of how classroom experiences or inclusive pedagogies may shape students' sense of belonging. While exiting definitions help identify educational contexts and specific feelings, they provide little insight into how students may come to develop these feelings. As a result, surveys based on these definitions may be limited to identifying the existence of a problem to instructors, and might not provide actionable insights to instructors who want to make their classrooms more inclusive. In this work, I developed a survey instrument based on a more recent framework on sense of belonging that breaks the construct down into four components: motivations, opportunities, competencies, and perceptions. According to psychometric evaluation, the survey instrument seems to model the conceptual framework well, though future work is needed to investigate how to improve individual questions as well as continued validation efforts to ensure the instrument translates to other institutional contexts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Fong, Morgan M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Herman, Geoffrey L
• Lewis, Colleen M
• Lane, H. Chad
• Lee, Eunsil

• computer science education
• sense of belonging
• undergraduate education
• survey development
• survey validation

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Morgan Fong

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129380

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129380