Article
Retention Rates for the First Three Years of a Linked-courses Learning Community
Proceedings of The 19th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
(2018)
Abstract
While enrollments in computing degrees and courses have grown
rapidly in the past decade, both female and minority male students
remain underrepresented in computing programs. This makes recruitment
and retention of these populations a continuing concern.
To attempt to address the issue at our institution, we created a
linked-courses learning community targeting females and minority
males enrolled in several computing majors. Here we present
retention rates for the first three years of the linked-courses learning
community. The results show that the learning community
appeared to make a difference for some cohorts, improving their
retention rate and academic performance over comparable institutional
populations. Unfortunately, the more challenges a cohort
faced in terms of factors that contribute to a difficult transition
to college, the less the learning community was able to overcome
these challenges. There were also other differences between the
cohorts, as seen in attitudes measured by pre- and post-quarter
surveys, that complicate generalizations about the impact of the
learning community.
Keywords
- CS1,
- learning community,
- programming,
- Python,
- retention,
- underrepresented
Disciplines
Publication Date
October, 2018
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241854
Citation Information
Amber Settle and Theresa Steinbach. 2018. Retention Rates for the First
Three Years of a Linked-courses Learning Community. In Proceedings of
The 19th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education, Fort Lauderdale,
FL, USA, October 3–6, 2018 (SIGITE ’18), 6 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241854