A Quantitative Study of Publications about Underrepresented Minority Undergraduate Students in Computer Science Majors in the United States

This is a full research paper. Including underrepresented minority groups (URM) in the computing field has been a challenge in the United States for a long time. Specifically, African American, Hispanic/Latinx and native American students continue to have low participation in computer science majors despite efforts to include these groups in Computer Science majors in the United States. In this context, the paper presents the research question: What types of publications are there in the literature about activities focused on including underrepresented minority groups in Computer Science majors in the United States? URM in this paper means minority African-American, Hispanic/Latinx and Native American students. To answer this question, a systematic literature mapping process covering the last 15 years (2009–2023) was applied using four academic sources: Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. The inclusion criteria were: documents published in a conference or journal; documents published in the period 2009-2023; computer science and education areas; documents focusing on underrepresented minority groups, specifically African American and Latinx/Hispanic and Native American; and documents concerning the undergraduate level. The exclusion criteria were: documents with less than four pages (an attempt to map only full papers); documents in a language other than English; documents that do not mention African American and Latinx/Hispanic; and documents from educational institutions outside of the U.S. We found 521 relevant papers about URM and CS majors, most of which were published at ASEE, FIE, and SIGCSE conferences. There has been an increasing number of papers published in these 15 years. In the last five years, 329 papers were found, representing more than 63% of all papers found in this literature mapping. The universities with the most publications were Florida University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Purdue University. California, Texas, and Florida are the top three states which the highest number of papers. We classified the paper and found 48 papers for EDM (educational data mining), 163 papers for Educational Model, Report 37, Perception 105, and Program 198.