Poster: Undo "Stuck in the Shallow End": A Mixed-Methods and Cross-Campus Interdisciplinary Approach to Computing Education

This record includes a poster and its session abstract from Evaluation 2026, the American Evaluation Association's annual conference (Charlotte, NC, November 19, 2026). UNC Charlotte already has data on where computing students come from and where they stall. The data sit in separate systems (pre-college files, enrollment lists, course outcomes, and support service records). Here we report a pilot project that merged these records for computing students in the Fall 2022 cohort. A UNC Charlotte Student Success Grant funded the work. The team spans four colleges and three campus offices. From the merged data, we built three prototype Tableau dashboards that show where students come from, how they start, and who stays. The poster shows the dashboards as of May 2025, with school names replaced by codes. The merged data show that 58% of Hispanic and 41% of Black computing students are first-generation. Many of these first-generation students come from a handful of high schools. Students from Davidson County high schools start with a lower first-term GPA. Women earn higher GPAs than men in most groups. In the Fall 2022 cohort, at least four in five Black students and women persisted to Year 4, compared with about three in four Hispanic students. Hearing from the students took more than an invitation. We invited 18 purposively sampled computer science (CS) undergraduates to a focus group. Two expressed interest. None attended. Because nobody came, we turned the interview protocol into a 14-question survey. Two students completed it. Both had taken at least 10 CS courses. Both were frustrated with grading and with unresponsive instructors and teaching assistants. For the next round, we would recruit early in the semester, pay students for their time, and send the survey before the focus group.