Who is Failing CS1? Early Results from DFW Rate Investigation

In our CS1 course, we found that students were failing at a rate similar to that reported in literature. In an effort to improve this DFW rate, we made a few changes to the course. While the changes led to some improvement, the results were not as significant as we expected. We found that in our CS1 course, first-semester students were passing at a significantly higher rate than non-first-semester students. Upon looking at other STEM and non-STEM courses at the university, we noted that the institution's first term calculus and introductory English courses had similar patterns, however the introductory sociology course did not. Further data analyses challenged several other of our beliefs about who was failing the course. Our findings leave us with several questions. Is this pattern specific to our university? Is this a particular course problem? From the perspective of the discipline, is there something in this data that points to a set of problems for computing education researchers to consider? This poster serves as both a presentation of our initial experiential results and an attempt to start a conversation amongst community members around whom actually is struggling within our early CS courses.