A critical research synthesis of privilege in computing education

Abstract

Privilege is an unearned, unasked-for advantage gained because of the way society views an aspect of a student's identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and language. Privilege may provide advantages to some students, and under-privileged students may face unfair barriers to success in education. We review and analyze existing research on privilege in STEM and computing with a focus on identifying privilege and inequality and noting and measuring the impact of privilege and underprivilege. There is more literature on privilege in the broader fields of general and STEM education than in computing education, so we use the superset to identify gaps in our understanding of privilege in computing education. We conclude with research questions that emerge from the gaps in the literature.