Development of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index

TL;DR

This work addresses the lack of standardized tools to measure computing students' attitudes toward ethical reflection and agency. It introduces the Critically Conscious Computing framework and develops the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index through domain identification, item generation, expert reviews, and cognitive interviews, resulting in a 40-item instrument with two primary constructs. The index is designed as a heuristic, content-validated tool to inform curriculum design, interventions, and longitudinal studies of students' ethical development, grounded in Freirean critical consciousness and HCI/STS perspectives. Its practical value lies in enabling targeted pedagogy and cross-institution comparisons, while future work will establish full psychometric validation and broader applicability beyond academia.

Abstract

As computing's societal impact grows, so does the need for computing students to recognize and address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While there are efforts to integrate ethics into computing curricula, we lack a standardized tool to measure those efforts, specifically, students' attitudes towards ethical reflection and their ability to effect change. This paper introduces the novel framework of Critically Conscious Computing and reports on the development and content validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and measure the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.