The Effect of a Computing-focused Linked-courses Learning Community on Minority and Female Students

While enrollments in computing degrees and courses have grown rapidly in the past decade, both female and minority male students remain underrepresented in computing programs. This makes recruitment and retention of these populations a continuing concern. Affinity for a major is connected to student retention, and learning communities have proven effective for this purpose. We present an evaluation of a three-year linked-courses learning community in which we measure pre- to post-quarter changes in student attitudes and resource utilization. We find that participants in the learning community are significantly more likely to report being a part of a group of programmers and having friends interested in computing. Participants also utilize two important resources in different ways than students in the same programming classes but not enrolled in the community.