TY - GEN
T1 - Characterizing First-year Students' Understanding of and Commitment to Social Justice
AU - Nower, Fyrose
AU - Ceesay, Sulayman
AU - Foster, Al Kesna
AU - Bassarath, Russel
AU - Margarucci, Cory
AU - Sridhar, Shreyas Narayanan
AU - Boulden, Kimberly
AU - Muller, Dalia
AU - Rudra, Atri
AU - Joseph, Kenneth
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/12/27
Y1 - 2025/12/27
N2 - This paper explores first-year computing students' motivation to pursue justice-oriented projects during their career. Drawing on 459 survey responses from a required first-year seminar at a large public university, we find that only 53% of computing majors agreed they were likely to commit to social justice work - significantly fewer than their non-computing peers (69%). Students who identified as Black, female, or non-U.S. citizens were more likely to express motivation. To better understand why students were (not) motivated, we conducted a thematic analysis on student free-text explanations of their Likert-scale responses. Most importantly, we identify a set of idealistic responses that demonstrate four core elements, reflecting students who 1) understand the need for justice work, 2) care enough about their fellow humans to engage in it, 3) feel agency to pursue it, and 4) see computing as a vehicle to do so. We use this typology to understand limitations of other responses consider what this means for future curriculum.
AB - This paper explores first-year computing students' motivation to pursue justice-oriented projects during their career. Drawing on 459 survey responses from a required first-year seminar at a large public university, we find that only 53% of computing majors agreed they were likely to commit to social justice work - significantly fewer than their non-computing peers (69%). Students who identified as Black, female, or non-U.S. citizens were more likely to express motivation. To better understand why students were (not) motivated, we conducted a thematic analysis on student free-text explanations of their Likert-scale responses. Most importantly, we identify a set of idealistic responses that demonstrate four core elements, reflecting students who 1) understand the need for justice work, 2) care enough about their fellow humans to engage in it, 3) feel agency to pursue it, and 4) see computing as a vehicle to do so. We use this typology to understand limitations of other responses consider what this means for future curriculum.
KW - Computing education
KW - First-year undergraduates
KW - Social justice
KW - Undergraduate Student attitudes
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105028730241
U2 - 10.1145/3769694.3771105
DO - 10.1145/3769694.3771105
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105028730241
T3 - ACM SIGCITE 2025 - Proceedings of the 26th ACM Annual Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education
SP - 260
EP - 266
BT - ACM SIGCITE 2025 - Proceedings of the 26th ACM Annual Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 26th ACM Annual Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education, ACM SIGCITE 2025
Y2 - 6 November 2025 through 8 November 2025
ER -