How Shared Gender Identity with Teaching Assistants Relates to Student Outcomes in an Undergraduate Algorithms Course
Background and Context. An ongoing thread in computing education research is how to increase women’s participation in computing. One potential way is to improve their sense of belonging, as prior research has found that individuals’ sense of belonging is related to their persistence in computing. Research from other STEM fields has shown that students benefit from sharing a gender identity with their professor. However, there is limited work on how a teaching assistant’s (TA) identity relates to students’ outcomes, especially in computing contexts. Objectives. We studied how sharing a gender identity with their discussion TA relates to students’ performance, sense of belonging, and comfort level participating in required discussion sections. Specifically, we investigated whether there were significant differences between male and female students in each of these outcomes and whether these differences were smaller when students shared a gender identity with their TA. Method. Using data from two offerings of an upper-level algorithms course (N = 298 students), we compared outcomes across groups of students that did versus did not share a gender identity with their discussion TA. Findings. In our context, we did not find significant evidence of a relationship between shared gender identity with TAs and student outcomes.
