This report provides technical documentation for psychometricians and researchers interested in developing brief, culturally sensitive computing career intentions surveys.

Nonformal computing education programs and learning opportunities conducted outside of school time provide a pathway for students, especially those from historically underrepresented groups, to enter computing careers. These programs typically evaluate their effectiveness through surveys that measure students’ attitudes about computing. Measuring students’ career intentions is more challenging, and surveys are typically long and impractical.

In 2022, WestEd used seven research-based constructs to develop a brief, culturally sensitive computing career intentions survey that measures individual, situational, and societal factors. WestEd then developed and conducted preliminary validation testing of the survey through a series of cognitive interviews and a small-scale field test with 50 respondents. The findings were reported in a 2023 paper presented at the 19th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER).

This technical report is a companion to the 2023 ICER paper. The ICER paper describes the background and motivation for the survey design and the initial survey design and validation through interviews with leaders and participants of informal computer science education programs. This technical report contains additional unpublished details about the field testing of the survey.

Key Insights

This report contains the results of two studies:

  1. a large-scale field test to more robustly establish the instrument’s reliability and test for differential item functioning (DIF)
  2. a test of the survey’s test–retest reliability with a subsample of participants from the large-scale field test