This program is tentative and subject to change.
Self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and imposter phenomenon are all phenomena related to an individual’s perception of themselves and others. They are well-studied with mature, validated surveys, and they all have implications on personal performance, including in the CS education context. One question that none of the phenomena address, however, is how a student perceives their own performance relative to their peers. For example, none of these accepted measures considers a student who thinks that “everyone in this classroom is smarter than me.” In this paper, we propose a survey to measure a previously unexplored phenomenon experienced by computer science (CS) students. We call this phenomenon relative self-efficacy, and it measures how highly a student perceives their ability relative to their peers. No prior attempt has been made to measure how students rate themselves relative to others or to understand the causes and effects of these comparisons. We find that the underlying factors of our survey are distinct from those that measure sense of belonging. We also find that women are more likely to experience lower relative self-efficacy than men. Lastly, we find that GPA is weakly correlated with relative self-efficacy and suggest that there may be stronger, less obvious influences on relative self-efficacy.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Fri 20 FebDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
10:40 - 12:00 | |||
10:40 20mTalk | CS Ed. in Prisons and Jails: Evidence of Computer Programming Self-Efficacy Growth Across Multiple Course Offerings Papers Andrew Fishberg MIT, Marisa Gaetz MIT, Martin Nisser University of Washington, Carole Cafferty MIT, Lee Perlman MIT, Raechel N. Soicher MIT, Joshua Long University of Massachusetts, Lowell | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Developing a Survey Instrument for Sense of Belonging in Computing CoursesMSI Papers Morgan Fong University of Texas at Austin, Andrea Watkins University of Illinois, Geoffrey Herman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | ||
11:20 20mTalk | Relative Self-Efficacy in Computer Science Courses Papers | ||