A Study on Student Performance in First Year CS Courses

Novice students often find it difficult to learn programming. Consequently this leads to high failure and high dropout rates. We must ask ourselves if these problems are caused by specific programming issues or if there are other courses that struggle with the same problem. This paper presents a study that involved Computer Science freshmen. The study tried to evaluate the connection of academic results between the first programming course and other first year courses. Subsequently the idea was to encourage teachers to dialogue about teaching and learning strategies concerning courses where the students' results are related, in order to share problems and solutions. Students were also submitted to a learning style test, in order to identify the influence of its dimensions in the obtained results.