Observations of Student Competency in a CS1 Course

Two issues of related interest are investigated in this paper. The first issue is associated with the statement that “Learning to program is a key objective in most introductory computing courses, yet many computing educators have voiced concern over whether their stu-dents are learning the necessary programming skills in those courses ” (McCracken et al. 2001). The sec-ond issue considers which task CS1 students find more difficult: code generation or code comprehension. To investigate this, we analysed our CS1 course results in terms of laboratory exercises, comprehension, gener-ation, factual/conceptual, and multiple-choice exam questions. Contrary to our initial expectations, the code comprehension and generation skills of our stu-dents appear to be tracking each other