Red Fish Blue Fish: Reexamining Student Understanding of the Computing Disciplines

This paper updates the findings of a multi-year study that is surveying major and non-major students' understanding of the different computing disciplines. This study is a continuation of work first presented by Uzoka et al in 2013 [11], which in turn was an expansion of work originally conducted by Courte and Bishop-Clark from 2009 [5]. In the current study, data was collected from 668 students from four universities from three different countries. Results show that students in general were able to correctly match computing tasks with specific disciplines, but were not as certain as the faculty about the degree of fit. Differences in accuracy between student groups were, however, discovered. Software engineering and computer science students had statistically significant lower accuracy scores than students from other computing disciplines. Consequences and recommendations for advising and career counselling are discussed.