Investigating the Role of Different Prep Pathways on CS2 Performance Across Three Different Majors

Research have shown that introductory programming sequence have a significant impact in the retention of students in computing and engineering majors. There has been extensive research about the CS1 course [1]. Much less has been written about the CS1.5 and CS2 course, which are often gateway courses for computing and engineering majors. CS2 classes often reflect a second semester course in programming, yet when studying this course many universities have different purposes for this course. Currently, there is a wide range of variation in CS courses. Some of these are used to expose students to a wider range of languages; in other cases, a new language is used to introduce concepts such as object-oriented programming, instead of the language used in CS1. However, even though CS2 is one of the fundamental courses in computing or CS major curriculum, the impacts of the different prep pathways leading to CS2 course is not well studied [2, 3]. Due to the critical nature of the CS2 course and its importance in CS major curriculum, in many institutions, CS2 or data structure course is recognized as an attrition point for CS Majors [4]. Understanding the impacts of the different prep pathways in CS2 course performance and the CS2 curriculum itself could give insights into the attrition behaviors. This paper presents a study which is conducted to understand the impact how student performance in CS2 course gets impacted by different programming languages used in CS1.5 course.