Adapting an Ecological Belonging Intervention to an Introductory Computer Science Course

Background and Context. Prior research has shown that students’ sense of belonging and self-efficacy are linked to their long-term performance and persistence in the computer science (CS) major. As a result, efforts specifically targeting these metrics may serve to broaden participation in CS. Brief psychological interventions within introductory classrooms have shown wide success in boosting student performance and sense of belonging in many other STEM fields, but the few implementations in CS courses have shown only mild success. More recently, STEM Education researchers developed an Ecological Belonging Intervention (EBI) that targets social contexts rather than individual psychology. It aims to create ecological change by introducing the classroom norm that adversity is surmountable and not a result of fixed or internal causes. The intervention was run in introductory biology, physics, and engineering classrooms, where it closed gender-based and race-based gaps in both performance and sense of belonging, and improved retention for students from historically underrepresented racial groups. Objectives. We sought to determine whether the EBI has similar effects in an introductory CS classroom. Additionally, we investigated the EBI’s impact on students’ self-efficacy. Method. We conducted a between-subjects study in an introductory CS course intended for students without prior programming experience, the majority of whom were women or non-binary. We evaluated the EBI’s influence on students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, performance, engagement, and persistence. Additionally, we examined whether the EBI is more effective for students from specific demographic groups. We measured students’ sense of belonging in CS using a recently-developed five-factor instrument that measures a student’s Acceptance, Affect, Membership, Desire to Participate, and Trust . We measured students’ self-efficacy using the corresponding subscale in the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) instrument. Findings. We found that students who received the EBI experienced significantly larger increases in self-efficacy than students who did not. Moreover, first-year students who received the EBI had significantly larger increases in the Affect factor of their sense of belonging. There were no other significant effects between the EBI and the outcomes of either the entire population or specific demographic groups. Implications. The EBI’s ability to improve students’ self-efficacy and the Affect factor of their sense of belonging suggests that it has the potential to increase CS students’ persistence and performance over time . We encourage researchers to further explore the EBI’s benefits in other CS contexts.