Christopher Watson
Failure rates in introductory programming revisited
Watson, Christopher; Li, Frederick W.B.
Authors
Dr Frederick Li frederick.li@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Contributors
J Godwin qcpf16@durham.ac.uk
Other
Åsa Cajander
Editor
Mats Daniels
Editor
Tony Clear
Editor
Arnold Pears
Editor
Abstract
Whilst working on an upcoming meta-analysis that synthesized fifty years of research on predictors of programming performance, we made an interesting discovery. Despite several studies citing a motivation for research as the high failure rates of introductory programming courses, to date, the majority of available evidence on this phenomenon is at best anecdotal in nature, and only a single study by Bennedsen and Caspersen has attempted to determine a worldwide pass rate of introductory programming courses. In this paper, we answer the call for further substantial evidence on the CS1 failure rate phenomenon, by performing a systematic review of introductory programming literature, and a statistical analysis on pass rate data extracted from relevant articles. Pass rates describing the outcomes of 161 CS1 courses that ran in 15 different countries, across 51 institutions were extracted and analysed. An almost identical mean worldwide pass rate of 67.7% was found. Moderator analysis revealed significant, but perhaps not substantial differences in pass rates based upon: grade level, country, and class size. However, pass rates were found not to have significantly differed over time, or based upon the programming language taught in the course. This paper serves as a motivation for researchers of introductory programming education, and provides much needed quantitative evidence on the potential difficulties and failure rates of this course.
Citation
Watson, C., & Li, F. W. (2014). Failure rates in introductory programming revisited. In Å. Cajander, M. Daniels, T. Clear, & A. Pears (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '14) (39-44). https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591749
Presentation Conference Type | Conference Paper (Published) |
---|---|
Conference Name | 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education (ITiCSE) |
Acceptance Date | Jun 1, 2014 |
Publication Date | Jan 1, 2014 |
Deposit Date | Jul 14, 2014 |
Publicly Available Date | Jul 13, 2016 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 39-44 |
Book Title | Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '14). |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591749 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1155929 |
Additional Information | Best Full Paper Award (Top downloaded paper on ACM SIGCSE over six weeks), updated on 01/10/2014 |
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Copyright Statement
© 2014 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '14), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2591708.2591749
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