What Exactly Are We Expecting Our Novice Programming Students to Achieve?

This project, kindly funded by a SIGCSE special projects award, aims to collect, categorize and analyze the learning outcome statements of CS1 courses across a large, diverse set of institutions, providing an answer to the question: What exactly are we expecting our novice programming students to achieve? This will allow the CS education community to decide if, as recent evidence has suggested, we have unrealistic expectations of our CS1 students (Luxton-Reilly, 2016). The outputs of this research will provide a starting point for the CS education community to adjust its expectations of novice programmers, resulting in improvements in failure rates, retention, diversity and equity in CS education. Upon completion of the project an online repository of CS1 learning outcomes will be available to, and updatable by, the CS education community.

Keep an eye on this page for our report, due out in 2018.