Do Intentions to Persist Predict Short-Term Computing Course Enrollments: A Scale Development, Validation, and Reliability Analysis

A key goal of many computer science education efforts is to increase the number and diversity of students who persist in the field of computer science and into computing careers. Many interventions have been developed in computer science designed to increase students’ persistence in computing. However, it is often difficult to measure the efficacy of such interventions, as measuring actual persistence by tracking student enrollments and career placements after an intervention is difficult and time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible. In the social sciences, attitudinal research is often used to solve this problem, as attitudes can be collected in survey form around the same time that interventions are introduced and are predictive of behavior. This can allow researchers to assess the potential efficacy of an intervention before devoting the time and energy to conduct a longitudinal analysis. In this paper, we develop and validate a scale to measure intentions to persist in computing, and demonstrate its use in predicting actual persistence as defined by enrolling in another computer science course within two semesters. We conduct two analyses to do this: First, we develop a computing persistence index and test whether our scale has high alpha reliability and whether our scale predicts actual persistence in computing using students’ course enrollments. Second, we conduct analyses to reduce the number of items in the scale, to make the scale easy for others to include in their own research. This paper contributes to research on computing education by developing and validating a novel measure of intentions to persist in computing, which can be used by computer science educators to evaluate potential interventions. This paper also creates a short version of the index, to ease implementation.