MWAIS 2024 Proceedings

Abstract

Many journal articles about Information Technology (IT) majors and introductory coding courses conclude that learning to code is considered difficult and often produces high failure and withdrawal rates. This paper discusses a few approaches taken at a midwestern university to attempt to lower those rates. One approach included adding an IT Learning Center which provides near-peer tutoring, debugging, and exam prep and review sessions. Another approach is a one-week long Summer IT Academy designed to assist incoming students to be successful in entry-level coding courses. The last approach includes implementing two designed interventions within the course that study the effect of adding live coding to the lecture and remote code collaboration software to the lab sections. Fall 2023 learning center statistics will be presented along with the positive effect on DFW rates. The near-peer tutoring is presented in depth here with preliminary data. Descriptions of the two additional course interventions and the IT Summer Academy are provided as future work.

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