Capital in Computing Education: Investigating Factors Underlying Participation

Computing education in Western countries has traditionally been characterised by low levels of participation and diversity among its student population. In order to broaden participation in the field, it is fundamental to understand why students engage with the subject, and what they aspire to get out of their education. One approach is to use the Bourdieusian concept of capital, referring to the legitimate, valuable and exchangeable resources that individuals use to generate social advantage within specific fields. This paper presents a survey developed to measure forms of capital which enable students to participate in computing-related fields, and succeed in it. The sample included 432 students from 6 large-scale universities in Sweden. Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the hypothesised survey structure was assessed in terms of model fit to the observed data, and adjusted to achieve a survey with high internal consistency among the items and factors (robust: (X2p) = 0.119; CFI/TLI = 0.97/0.95; RMSEA = 0.06, SRMR = 0.041). Using the proposed model, group differences were observed using the Mann-WhitneyU test. Using a significance threshold of 0.05, differences between computing ((n = 241)) and non-computing ((n = 191)) students were observed for 11 out of 14 survey items, whereas for male ((n = 189)) and female ((n = 46)) computing students, differences were observed for 6 items. These results suggest that there is a relationship between the proposed forms of capital and participation in computing education, and that this relationship is stronger for male computing students.