Incarcerated students enrolled in education programs in prisons and jails experience a range of benefits, from reduced recidivism to improved psychosocial well-being. With respect to computer science education, little is still known about how courses impact incarcerated students’ experiences, though recent work has explored fears and confidence of incarcerated students enrolled in computer science courses. Our work investigates incarcerated students’ changes in self-efficacy over multiple iterations of four different classes. Our findings showed that all subscales of computer programming self-efficacy (algorithm, control, cooperation, debugging, and logic), but not generalized self-efficacy, were statistically significantly increased at the end of the courses relative to the beginning (p < 0.001, n = 36). A similar pattern of results across the full sample (n = 188) adds additional support for the veracity of the effects found in the subset of paired data. Additionally, we share students’ qualitative data to add nuance to our findings and emphasize the importance of these educational experiences for incarcerated students’ personal and professional development.

Fri 20 Feb

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10:40 - 12:00
Belonging and Becoming: Self-Efficacy in CS From Prisons to CampusesPapers at Meeting Room 101
Chair(s): Sri Yash Tadimalla Computing Research Association
10:40
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
Developing a Survey Instrument for Sense of Belonging in Computing CoursesMSI
Papers
Morgan Fong University of Texas at Austin, Andrea Watkins University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Geoffrey Herman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
11:20
20m
Talk
Relative Self-Efficacy in Computer Science Courses
Papers
Joseph Ditton , John Edwards Utah State University