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Behaviors of Higher and Lower Performing Students in CS1

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Although recent work in computing has discovered multiple techniques to identify low-performing students in a course, it is unclear what factors contribute to those students' difficulties. If we were able to better understand the characteristics of such students, we may be better able to help those students. This work examines the characteristics of low- and high-performing students through interviews with students from an introductory computing class. We identify a number of relevant areas of student behavior including how they approach their exam studies, how they approach completing programming assignments, whether they sought help after identifying misunderstandings, how and from whom they sought help, and how they reflected on assignments after submitting them. Particular behaviors within each area are coded and differences between groups of students are identified.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
July 2019
583 pages
ISBN:9781450368957
DOI:10.1145/3304221
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 July 2019

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Author Tags

  1. cs1
  2. student behaviors
  3. student interviews
  4. student performance

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