Content area
Computing Education Research (CER) has traditionally spent considerable effort on studying the difficulties faced by first year students, particularly in the first programming course students take (commonly referred to as CS1), as well as final-year students as they transition from their undergraduate studies to professional positions. In a sense, the computer science (CS) curriculum has been treated as a black box; work has been conducted to study and develop interventions to support students as they begin their educational process and as they leave. However, there exists little if any research into middle-year students. This fails to consider what difficulties students face in terms of the shifting landscape of content knowledge within these middle years. Data has also suggested that retention is not a problem limited to first-year students as has been previously assumed, indicating that there is an even greater need for research into supporting middle-year students.
The work discussed in this dissertation begins to fill in this gap in our understanding of middle-year student difficulties through the lens of the content knowledge we expect students to face. Student success has been shown to be influenced by three factors: students’ sense of belonging, their identity, and their self-efficacy. These success factors are impacted negatively when students run into troublesome learning experiences while simultaneously not feeling as though they have the support needed to overcome them. This work looks to conduct a holistic review of the overarching computer science curriculum during these years to determine what students are expected to learn, what they find to be the biggest intellectual hurdles during these years, and what methods of support they feel is lacking that precludes them from learning these concepts. The proposed work will contribute to CER by providing an overall sense of what the computing curriculum consists of across universities, knowledge of what concepts students have found to be most difficult within middle-year computer science, and finally a learning resource repository for anyone to use to help learn the most reported difficult concepts.
