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Failure rates in introductory programming revisited

Watson, Christopher; Li, Frederick W.B.

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Authors

Christopher Watson



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

Conference Name 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education (ITiCSE)
Conference Location Uppsala
Acceptance Date Jun 1, 2014
Publication Date Jan 1, 2014
Deposit Date Jul 14, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
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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