seniors agreed less with faculty than CS1 students were in cluster 2. Compared to CS1 students, fewer seniors believed “real-world” CS requires creativity (item 50); fewer believed that either the reasoning skills of CS (item 60) or its theoretical concepts (item 22) were relevant to everyday life, and (as we discussed), fewer still were intentionally reflective when solving CS problems (item 44).

Overall, the average agreement between seniors and faculty was 67% for cluster 1 and 63% for cluster 2, not very different. But the average increase in agreement with faculty, comparing seniors with CS1 students, was 16 percentage points for cluster 1 and only one percentage point for cluster 2. The results suggest the curriculum falls significantly short in helping students develop the perspective that CS is an intellectual discipline.

conclusion

The survey results and analysis suggest a number of challenges to the curriculum in which the students and faculty participated. Using one item ( 50) as an illustration, faculty must consider ways to move students toward the idea that “The work you do in computer science in the real world requires a lot of creativity,” rather than away from it. A next step could be collecting longitudinal data from the same students as they move through the curriculum. Collecting data in key courses at the beginning and end of a semester would also be useful in separating the effects of selection from the effects of courses themselves and in zeroing in on the effectiveness of courses intended to promote particular attitudes and beliefs.

Besides being important learning
targets in themselves, the attitudes
and beliefs explored here may also
be important in other ways. Studies
in university physics education show
that student attitudes and beliefs re-
late to performance on content as-
sessments. 1, 13 Studies in physics edu-
cation also show direct evidence of
selection, rather than a change in at-
titude, as more advanced students are
compared with beginners. This selec-
tion effect raises the possibility that
understanding student attitudes and
beliefs could be important in terms
of retention and understanding why
some groups are less well represented
than others in CS programs. Although
we did not collect data on gender, it is
possible that attitudes and trends dif-
fer for male and female students, and
that understanding them could help
address underrepresentation of wom-
en in CS.

acknowledgements
An earlier report of these results ap-
peared in 2007 in the ACM SIGCSE Bul-
letin. 9 We thank Amer Diwan, Chris-
tian Doerr, Noah Finkelstein, Gary
Nutt, Steven Pollock, Bruce Sanders,
and Brian Shuckey for ideas, inspira-
tion, and assistance. This project was
an activity of the President’s Teaching
and Learning Collaborative (http://
www.colorado.edu/ptsp/ptlc/) of the
University of Colorado.

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Clayton Lewis ( [e-mail]) is a professor in the department of computer science at the university of colorado at boulder.

Michele h. Jackson (michele.jackson@colorado. edu) is an associate professor in the department of communication at the university of colorado at boulder.

William M. Waite ( [e-mail]) is a professor emeritus in the department of electrical, computer, and energy engineering at the university of colorado at boulder.