- Several variables had no significant influence on retention, including race (Underrepresented Minority and Majority), the interaction of race and gender, academic year, and age.
- Meaningful assignments, student-faculty interaction, male gender, collaboration on programming assignments, and prior experience and workload were all significantly associated with retention.
- Within-major social life, egalitarian environment, and classroom climate were not found to have a significant effect on retention in any group. However, classroom climate did have a small significant negative effect on students that were in the racial majority but the authors have limited confidence in this finding.
- Meaningful assignments maintained the strongest effect size across all groups and was highly significant as a predictor of retention in each model. Of note, the effect size substantially increased for females and underrepresented minority students as compared to males.
- Collaboration on programming assignments was moderately important and statistically significant to all groups except underrepresented minorities.
- With respect to differences across departments surveyed, the authors found that interaction with teaching assistants was negatively associated with retention. They speculate that the reason for this may lie in differences among institutions in terms of the effectiveness of how teaching assistants are trained or used.
- Prior experience and workload was not a predictor for women. This is not surprising since they tend to enter computing majors with less prior experience than their male counterparts.