Can a Student Organization Decrease Introductory CS Course Withdrawals among Students of Color?
Khadija Jirari Stewart, Allana Johnson, Gloria Childress Townsend · 2021
DePauw has sponsored a Women in Computing student organization since the early 1990s. Over the years the sponsors noticed that the club did not serve our female students of color (SoC) as well as it might and that it did not serve male SoC at all. In 2016 we conducted a survey and a focus group to assess student enthusiasm for initiating a student organization for all students of color in computing (SoCiC) and found uniform support for such a club. The researchers also collected data about SoCiC and found that this population persists to graduation at the same robust rate that all students follow, once the two introductory courses are completed. SoCiC withdrew from the two introductory courses at higher rates (and therefore dropped the computer science major) than students from other racial/ethnic groups. We applied for and received grants from both the Mellon Foundation and the Ball Brothers Foundation. Our grant proposal goals lay in recruiting, retaining, and celebrating SoCiC. The three sponsors of our student organization, Computing Opportunities for Students of Color (COSOC), now find ourselves in the last year of grant funding. We recently collected data concerning the withdrawal rates for each of our two introductory courses for Black, Hispanic, and All students - both prior to COSOC and after COSOC. Our data show that the withdrawal rates for SoCiC are lower in post-COSOC semesters than in pre-COSOC semesters. In future work we want to pursue a qualitative study of COSOC.