research-article

Red Fish Blue Fish: Reexamining Student Understanding of the Computing Disciplines

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Annabella HabinkaAuthors Info & Claims

SIGITE '16: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education

Pages 115 - 120

https://doi.org/10.1145/2978192.2978232

Published: 28 September 2016 Publication History

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Abstract

This paper updates the findings of a multi-year study that is surveying major and non-major students' understanding of the different computing disciplines. This study is a continuation of work first presented by Uzoka et al in 2013 [11], which in turn was an expansion of work originally conducted by Courte and Bishop-Clark from 2009 [5]. In the current study, data was collected from 668 students from four universities from three different countries. Results show that students in general were able to correctly match computing tasks with specific disciplines, but were not as certain as the faculty about the degree of fit. Differences in accuracy between student groups were, however, discovered. Software engineering and computer science students had statistically significant lower accuracy scores than students from other computing disciplines. Consequences and recommendations for advising and career counselling are discussed.

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Cited By

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Redmond F(2022)With a Rise in Computing Disciplines Comes a Greater Choice of Computing Degrees in Higher EducationProceedings of the 22nd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3564721.3565946(1-11)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3564721.3565946
Kim SHansen DHelps R(2018)Computing research in the academyScientometrics10.1007/s11192-017-2572-y114:1(135-158)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11192-017-2572-y

Index Terms

Red Fish Blue Fish: Reexamining Student Understanding of the Computing Disciplines
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Information technology education

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SIGITE '16: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education

September 2016

188 pages

ISBN:9781450344524

DOI:10.1145/2978192

Conference Chair:
Deborah Boisvert
University of Massachusetts Boston, USA
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Program Chair:
Stephen Zilora
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 September 2016

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SIGITE/RIIT 2016: The 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education and the 5th Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology

September 28 - October 1, 2016

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Redmond F(2022)With a Rise in Computing Disciplines Comes a Greater Choice of Computing Degrees in Higher EducationProceedings of the 22nd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3564721.3565946(1-11)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3564721.3565946
Kim SHansen DHelps R(2018)Computing research in the academyScientometrics10.1007/s11192-017-2572-y114:1(135-158)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11192-017-2572-y

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Computing is not a rock band: student understanding of the computing disciplines

Examining the Differences in Three Computing Fields with High School Students

Computing curricula 2005: and guide

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