Why do CS1 students become repeaters?

Abstract

Learning to program is hard for many students. As a result, CS1 courses have a significant percentage of repeaters. For this reason, the goal of this article is to analyze which factors affect repeaters so that a specific learning strategy for them can be performed. In this regard, a first analysis of a CS1 course shows there are two types of repeaters: (1) those who do (almost) nothing throughout the semester and drop out, and (2) those who work during the whole semester, but finally fail. According to repeaters’ perceptions, they were motivated to learn to program, but it was difficult for them to keep up because of it was so hard to reconcile it with their personal context, so based on what they did the previous semester, they would prefer to continue from where they left off or change the pace of activities.