Characterising Graduateness in Computing Education: A Narrative Approach

This thesis examines the concept of graduateness in computing education. Graduateness is related to efforts to articulate the outcomes of a university education. It is commonly defined as the attributes all graduates should develop by the time they graduate regardless of university attended or discipline studied (Glover, Law and Youngman 2002). This work takes a different perspective grounded in disciplinary and institutional contexts. It aims to explore how graduates make sense of their experiences studying computing within their wider learning trajectories.

The research presented here uses a narrative approach. Whilst narrative methodologies are not commonly used in computing education, people construct stories both to make sense of their experiences and to integrate the "past, present, and an anticipated future" (McAdams 1985, p.120). Stories are then a particularly appropriate way of examining the sense people make of their learning experiences. This work draws on narrative interviews with graduates from the School of Computing at the University of Kent and Olin College of Engineering in the United States.

It contributes a new perspective about the effect of a computing education beyond short-term outcome measures and proposes several analytic constructs that expose significant aspects in participants' learning experiences. In this, it describes themes related to students' acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and examines the evolution of their stories of learning computing over time.