Investigating the Impact of Employing Multiple Interventions in a CS1 Course

Given the long-standing concern about students failing introductory programming courses, there is a need for interventions that may aid those students. In this work, we examine the potential benefit of three interventions based on prior computing education research (CER) or STEM education research literature: mindset interventions, the use of “Thinkathons” as an alternative to programming labs, and metacognitive interventions to encourage more productive study habits. We conducted an in-class study that controlled for both time-on-task and selection bias to investigate the potential benefits of integrating these interventions into the existing footprint of an introductory computing course. Despite the previously reported promise of the interventions we implemented, our findings were that in this context these techniques had only a mild positive effect for some students. We discuss possible reasons why these techniques are less successful than instructors might hope and argue for the need for more research on this topic.