Investigating Identity Recognition Across Time and Method: Undergraduate Scholars’ Deepening Computing Identities

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Abstract

Sociocultural theorists draw on interactive, agentic, and dynamic conceptions of identity, in which who a person is can be reframed as who a person is becoming. In this paper, we address student academic and professional identity development in the context of computer science. Student participants of a scholarship program indicated in survey data and in interviews that they have shifted their conceptions of their computing identities, with the most change over time exhibited in their conception of recognition by others as a computer scientist. This multimethod study indicates how differing elements of an undergraduate computer science identity may form over time, place, and space, and the multiple ways faculty are perceived as acknowledging (or not) computer science identities of undergraduates.

Authors

• Wendy Chi, Colorado Evaluation & Research Consulting

• Mark McKay, Colorado Evaluation & Research Consulting

• Sarah Hug, Colorado Evaluation & Research Consulting