Gender related correlations of computer science students

Highlights

• Male students think studies did not positively influence their intellectual growth.

• Mathematics courses presented to them will not help them in professional lives.

• Both genders are secure about their future careers in Serbia.

• Both genders are not in FYRO Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania.

• Both genders in Serbia are pessimistic how their studies prepared them for career.

Abstract

In this article, statistical findings obtained by a large survey containing about 120 questions and options are presented. An inquiry using this survey was carried out on a considerable sample of students from four countries of Balkan region, studying different directions of computer science. Students belong to universities that are members of a joint educational project, plus three of the involved countries, emerged from the same country, former Yugoslavia, therefore the results are comparable. Data was analyzed and here we present the most interesting correlations and opinions about satisfaction and views about computer science studies and prospects. Students surveyed were of both female and male population, from two faculties of mathematics, and two faculties of electrical engineering from the four countries of the Balkan region.

Introduction

Research on opinions of computer science students from Novi Sad, Serbia either considering gender differences (Ivanović et al., 2011, Ivanović et al., 2013a), or privacy issues (Ivanović et al., 2013b, Ivanović et al., 2009), has been going on for some time now. A large and interested base of students joined within common DAAD educational project¹ (Budimac et al., 2012, Budimac et al., 2014), and with bilateral and multilateral educational projects (SE-CSERC, 2014, eLearning, 2014) was considered. Thus, there was an opportunity to survey their views and expectations for the future life in general and success within a field of computer science.

The conducted survey included four universities, from four countries. Three of those countries came out from the same country, Yugoslavia. The fourth country belongs to the same region, so the expectation is that the results should be comparable. The main reason for that assumption is that all countries emerged from the similar background and have the similar level of the economic development. Observed universities are part of the mentioned DAAD project, and they conducted the same survey, dealing with three connected issues of computer science studies:

• General data about students,

• Questions considering students motivation for studying computer science, and

• Questions trying to investigate students' ambitions and vision of future career.

Results were analyzed and two articles with the joint opinions and combined results for four countries were already published (Ivanović et al., 2013a, Ivanović et al., 2011). Still, looking into the data, there remained a suspicion that students from different countries might have diverse opinions on certain issues. Unfortunately, at that moment, the lack of data prevented deeper study of the problem. Finally now, after collecting enough data, it is possible to analyse if there is a statistically significant difference of opinions between countries or genders. For start, Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics concerning the number of students participating in our survey.

Our research of the gathered data showed not only that the opinions are different, but further that this difference is sometimes statistically significant. As it will be presented in this article, this difference is both visible between students from Novi Sad, Serbia and the rest of the countries. Also the difference exists between male population of Novi Sad students and the “rest of the world” surveyed.

The rest of the article is organized as follows: in the second section, related work and overview of the literature is presented. Section three explains the questionnaire used and methodology in more details, while sections four and five present the most interesting statistical findings reached. The last section presents some conclusions, and directions for the future work.