Improving Student Success and Retention in CS1 Through Self-Selection into Experience-Based Groups
April Renee Crockett, Gerald C. Gannod, Moumita Kamal · 2023
This Innovative Practice Full Paper addresses the challenges of distribution of prior experience among students in the first course for computing majors (CS1) by allowing students to self-select an experience-based group for their lecture class. Rising enrollments in computer science have caused many challenges for computer science educators in student learning, engagement, and success. Included in these challenges is the diversity of previous programming experience of new students. To address these challenges, we introduced a student-centered learning approach in a test section of our CS1 course whereby students were afforded the ability to self-select an experience-based group. We also had a control section of our CS1 course that remained in the traditional setting of not having experience-based groups. The results from our collected data suggest that having self-selected experience-based groups improves retention and student success.