The global shortage of skilled programmers remains a persistent challenge. High dropout rates in introductory programming courses pose a significant obstacle to graduation. Previous studies highlighted learning difficulties in programming students, but their specific weaknesses remained unclear. This gap exists due to the predominant focus on the…

"Motivation": Enrollments in Brazilian computing degrees are at an all-time high, but graduation numbers have not increased at the same rate. Moreover, enrollment growth has mainly attracted male students, steadily expanding the gender gap in Brazilian computing programs. Such high attrition rates have a great economic impact and may…

Computer science is a dynamic field of study that requires constant review and updating of the curricular designs in academic programs--in general, measuring the impact of plan changes has been little explored in the literature. In most cases, it focuses only on structuring its curricula, leaving aside several factors associated with important…

Contribution: The main contribution of this study is to gather and report on the challenges faced by IS courses based on the professors' perspectives. Background: Information systems (ISs) area focuses on the interplay among people, processes/organizations, and technologies. As such, stimulating technical and nontechnical competencies are required…

Participants' engagement in massive online open courses (MOOCs) is highly irregular and self-directed. It is well known in the field of television media that substantial parts of the audience tend to drop out at major episodic, or seasonal, closures, which makes creating cliff-hangers a crucial strategy to retain viewers (Bakker, 1993; Cazani,…

Liberalisation of higher education in Uganda meant opening its provision to the private sector, and also running a public-private mix model at public institutions. Consequently, the composition and needs of the student population at universities have changed due to flexibility in provision of study programmes and access routes. Students who had…

We present an educational data analytics case study aimed at the early detection of potential dropout in Computer Engineering studies in Cuba. We have employed institutional data of 456 students and performed several experiments for predicting their permanency into three (promotion, repetition, and dropout) or two classes (promoting, not…

Predictive learning analytics has been widely explored in educational research to improve student retention and academic success in an introductory programming course in computer science (CS1). General-purpose and interpretable dropout predictions still pose a challenge. Our study aims to reproduce and extend the data analysis of a privacy-first…

The need for a knowledge-based society has perpetuated an increasing demand for higher education around the globe. Recently, there has been an increase in the demand for Computer Science professionals due to the rise in the use of ICT in the business, health and education sector. The enrollment numbers in Computer Science undergraduate programmes…

The teaching-learning methodology adopted in the Introduction to Computer Science classes may be a process that makes it difficult to understand the principles of programming language for undergraduate students in Computer Science and related areas, generating high failure and course drop out rates. This paper presents an analysis of the results…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pre-enrollment attributes of first-year students at Computer Science BSc programs of the University of Miskolc, Hungary in order to find those that mostly contribute to failure on the Programming Basics first-semester course and, consequently to dropout. Our aim is to detect at-risk students early,…

This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation.…

This work discusses a nudging intervention mechanism combined with an artificial intelligence (AI) system for early detection of learners' risk of failing or dropping out. Different types of personalized nudges were designed according to educational principles and the learners' risk classification. The impact on learners' performance, dropout…

This paper is derived from a field study in the framework of my doctoral dissertation, in which we analyze life stories (Bertaux, 2005) of young people who have discontinued their studies at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in four courses with a high rate of dropout between the years 2005-2015: Computer Engineering, Anthropological Sciences,…

With the removal of the barriers of time and distance, E-learning platforms have attracted millions of learners, but these platforms are experiencing a significant drop-out ratio. One of the primary reasons for this problem is the lack of motivation among the learners because of the similar learning experience provided to them despite their…