Abstract
Students' performances in introductory programming courses show large variation across students. There may be many reasons for these variations, such as methods of teaching, teacher competence in the subject, students' coding backgrounds and abilities, students' self-discipline, the teaching environment, and the resources available to students, all of which can affect student performance and outcomes. Our observations in teaching programming courses (at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh) are that many students (up to 50% per course) drop out. There is a strong belief by many instructors that such a high dropout rate is due, at least in part, to students underestimating the effort needed to finish this course and not following instructions as recommended. This paper reviews the factors that affect student performance in an introductory programming course (CS1) and aims to discover correlations between various assessment methods, students' participation and their final performance measured. It analyses mark distributions across various assessment methods to identify which assessment method best predicts final exam marks and overall marks, and gives recommendations for assessment in introductory programming courses.
Highlights
The results show that students with good intrinsic motivation had less difficulty completing the course than other students; the problem arose with students who had poor motivation, and it was found that these students were enrolled in the course rather arbitrarily and faced few consequences for failure
This section presents and analyses student marks across three consecutive terms with the same instructor using the same teaching method and mark distribution. It compares each assessment method against the others, and these methods are compared with the total mark to see how they correlate
Previous work on factors that affect student performance in introductory programming courses clearly shows the importance of many factors that have direct or indirect effects, including student motivation, confidence, comfort level, background and teaching style
Summary
The goal of this study is to discover any correlation between marks on different assignments and tests within the programming course
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