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Delineating Factors that Influence Student Performance in a Data Structures Course

(Full paper, Research category) The stakeholders in the computer science education have been trying to pinpoint the most relevant factors and variables contributing significantly to student recruitment, success, and retention in computing degrees over the last several decades. The goal of these efforts is to intervene using these controllable variables as early as possible and at key transition junctions for the most benefit to the students. Yet, there is still not a general agreement, let alone a consensus, neither on the most important factors nor on the degree of their contributions. While we cannot provide a panacea to this elusive and challenging problem, in this paper, we report our initial study, analyses, and results of what we intend to transform into a longitudinal undertaking to delineate success factors in computing programs in general, and in CS2 (data structures) courses in particular. Our analyses confirm some of the findings from the literature, such as CS1 performance as the most important contributor for CS2 success as well as prior programming experience, and perception of computing. At the same time we diverge from some of the literature on such factors as high school GPA or CSO performance. Our conclusions corroborate one of the rare consensus in the computing education literature that more efforts should still be exerted in this important topic. We also provide a new and novel taxonomy of the factors for success in computing programs as well as a short summary of the ACM Guidelines over time.