Uncovering difficulties in learning for the intermediate programmer

Within computer science education, we have spent considerable effort on the introduction to the discipline (particularly to programming) and the teaching of novice programmers. However, we do not often think about the teaching and learning for the intermediate students. Having data about student's perceptions coming into a second year data structures course, it became of interest to systematically analyze the data to see what if any interesting patterns or results we could see in this information. Using the data from a first day of class general survey, we were able to gather information about student's perceived level of difficulty with some of the major topics that they have studied up until this point in the curriculum. The first half of the survey consisted of ten Likert-type items representing ten different topics in the previous courses. We are able to present quantitative analysis of the students perceived level of difficulty with these topics. The second half of the survey asked several open-ended questions about their learning. In this paper, we also provide analysis of the first of these questions which asked them to identify a topic that they studied previously that they still do not understand well. While not yet giving us the ability to generalize, this data shows some interesting information about students' perceived difficulty at a point in the curriculum that is not often studied, the intermediate years, and the results make an interesting case for further exploration of this problem with a larger group of students at more and diverse institutions.