A study of the impact of student background and preparedness on outcomes in CS I (original) (raw)

The prior experience of entering CS students

CTIT technical reports series, 2011

One of the foremost issues for instructors of "Introduction to Programming" or "CS1" courses is the diversity of students' backgrounds { on one end of the range, a signicant portion of students start their computing degree without prior programming expertise, while on the other end, many students have even worked in a job where programming was a substantial part. This diversity makes it dicult to adapt programming instruction to students' prior experience. The present article describes students' programming and computing experience when entering the ETH Computer Science bachelor program. It is based on the data of over 900 ETH students participating in the study in the past seven years and 77 students from University of York answering the questionnaire in 2008. The article reports on the analysis of changes over the years, presents a comparison between the data of ETH and York, and describes the pedagogical implications for courses and textbooks.

An ITiCSE 2004 Working Group: A Study of the Programming Knowledge of First-Year CS Students

www-staff.it.uts.edu.au

Despite our best efforts, many students are still challenged by programming. A 2001 ITiCSE working group (the “McCracken group”) assessed the programming ability of a large population of students from eight universities, in the United States and four other countries [McCracken, 2001]. Each author tested his or her own students from a common set of programming problems. The students at each institution were required to write a program to solve one of the problems. Most students at all the institutions performed much more ...

What do CS1 and CS2 mean?: investigating differences in the early courses

2010

Abstract Thirty-one years ago, the ACM Computing Curricula used the terms" CS1" and" CS2" to designate the first two two courses in the introductory sequence of a computer science major. While computer science education has greatly changed since that time, we still refer to introduction to programming courses as CS1 and basic data structures courses as CS2. This common shorthand is then used to enable students to transfer between institutions and as a base of many research studies.

Prior Programming Experience: A Persistent Performance Gap in CS1 and CS2

Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1

Previous work has reported on the advantageous effects of prior experience in CS1, but it remains unclear whether these effects fade over a sequence of introductory programming courses. Furthermore, while student perceptions suggest that prior experience remains important, studies have reported that a student's expectation of their performance is a more accurate predictor of outcome. We aim to confirm if prior experience (formal or informal) provides short-term and long-term advantages in computing courses or if the advantage fades. Furthermore, we explore whether the expectation of performance is a more accurate predictor of student success than informal and formal prior experience. To explore these questions, we deployed surveys in a CS1 course to gauge students' level of prior experience in programming, prediction of final exam grades, and self-efficacy to succeed in university. Grades from CS1 and CS2 were also collected. We observed a persistent (1-letter grade) gap between the performance of students with no prior experience and those with any experience, but we did not observe a noteworthy gap when comparing student performance based on formal or informal experience. We also observed differences in self-efficacy and retention rates between different levels of prior experience. Lastly, we confirm that success in CS1 can be better reflected and predicted by some controllable factors, such as students' perceptions of ability. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computer science education; CS1.

Programming: predicting student success early in CS1. a re-validation and replication study

Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 2018

This paper describes a large, multi-institutional revalidation study conducted in the academic year 2015-16. Six hundred and ninetytwo students participated in this study, from 11 institutions (ten institutions in Ireland and one in Denmark). The primary goal was to validate and further develop an existing computational prediction model called Predict Student Success (PreSS). In doing so, this study addressed a call from the 2015 ITiCSE working group (the second "Grand Challenge"), to "systematically analyse and verify previous studies using data from multiple contexts to tease out tacit factors that contribute to previously observed outcomes". PreSS was developed and validated in a longitudinal study conducted over a three year period (twelve years previous from 2004-06). PreSS could predict with near 80% accuracy, how a student would likely perform on an introductory programming module. Notably this could be achieved at a very early stage in the module. This paper describes a revalidation of the original PreSS model on a significantly larger multi-institutional data set twelve years after its initial development and looks at recent research on additional factors that may improve the model. The work involved the development of a fully automated end-to-end tool, which can predict student success early in CS1, with an accuracy of 71%. This paper describes, in detail the PreSS model, recent research, pilot studies and the re-validation and replication study of the PreSS model. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computer science education; CS1;

What do beginning CS majors know

2009

The standard “Introduction to Programming” or “CS1” course traditionally assumes that it will be, for most students, the first serious exposure to programming. For the past six years, we have queried our students, in the first weeks of class, about what they know. Results are compelling: virtually all beginning CS students have used computers for over two years, and many for ten years or more; on average, they know at least one programming language in depth; many have written significant systems. These and other measures of prior knowledge have been stable over the query period. This article analyzes both the results obtained and their pedagogical implications for courses and textbooks.

Evolution of an introductory computer science course: the long haul

University requirements for the material covered in introductory computer science courses have evolved over the years, and those courses must therefore evolve as well. In this paper, we discuss the 7-year evolution of such a course at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1995, the main thrust of the course was to develop students' programming skills to support later programming activities, even for those students not majoring in computer science. Although some general survey topics were covered, programming skill development was the main goal of the course. Since that time, the course has evolved significantly into a course that covers general computer science and Information Technology (IT) topics in greater depth and breadth, with a continuing but greatly reduced programming component. During that 7-year period, we changed programming languages for the course, significantly changed the way in which we evaluated programming ability, incorporated graphics into the course, conducted an...

Observations of student competency in a CS1 course

2005

Two issues of related interest are investigated in this paper. The first issue is associated with the statement that "Learning to program is a key objective in most introductory computing courses, yet many computing educators have voiced concern over whether their students are learning the necessary programming skills in those courses" (McCracken et al. 2001). The second issue considers which task CS1 students find more difficult: code generation or code comprehension. To investigate this, we analysed our CS1 course results in terms of laboratory exercises, comprehension, generation, factual/conceptual, and multiple-choice exam questions. Contrary to our initial expectations, the code comprehension and generation skills of our students appear to be tracking each other.

A study to identify predictors of achievement in an introductory computer science course

Proceedings of the 2003 SIGMIS conference on Computer personnel research Freedom in Philadelphia--leveraging differences and diversity in the IT workforce - SIGMIS CPR '03, 2003

In the study reported on here, 65 prospective computer or information science majors (47 male, 18 female) worked through a tutorial on the basics of Perl. All actions were recorded and time-stamped, allowing us to investigate the relationship between six factors that we believed would predict performance in an introductory computer science (CS) course (as measured by course grade) and how much students would learn from the tutorial (as measured by gain score from pre-test to post-test). These factors are: preparation (SAT score, number of previous CS courses taken, and pre-test score), time spent on the tutorial as a whole and on individual sections, amount and type of experimentation, programming accuracy and/or proficiency, approach to materials that involve mathematical formalisms, and approach to learning highly unfamiliar material (string manipulation procedures). Gender differences with respect to these factors were also investigated.