Undergraduate Computer Science Student Perceptions of their Own Field

It is not just K-12 students that have misconceptions about computer science. Undergraduate students entering into a post-secondary computer science major also have significant misconceptions about what a computer scientist actually does on a day-to-day basis, even at the end of their four-year undergraduate computer science program. While the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) investigates student perceptions of scientists in general (Chambers, 1983) and the Draw-An- Engineer Test (DAET) examines student perceptions of engineers (Knight and Cunningham, 2004), there have been few adaptations investigating student perceptions of computer scientists (Martin, 2004). Based on previous research, our study assessed undergraduate computer science student perceptions of computer scientists at both a mid-size research university and a small liberal arts college. Students (n=120) were asked to describe computer scientists in both a visual format and a written format using an adaptation of the DAST. The authors share comparative results for computer science students (pre-test, post-test) perceptions when 1) exposed to an intentional but not explicit curriculum with diverse representation of computer scientist images and a broad range of computer science research areas, and 2) exposed to a regular curriculum without intentional messages about the diversity of computer scientists and the diversity of research areas within the discipline. The poster describes additional scoring measures introduced beyond those in previous instruments which help to better categorize and interpret perceptions of computer science students about their own discipline.