High School Socioeconomic Neighborhood Status and CS1 Performance

CS1 student success rates are a longstanding issue in the computer science community. Indicators of performance prior to CS1 continue to be investigated in research, especially concerning prior programming and math courses taken at the high school level. This study aims to take a look at students’ high school socioeconomic neighborhood status and determines whether there is a correlation to CS1 performance. Specifically, we examine the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) of the high schools that CS1 students attended and the passing rates in CS1 based on the socioeconomic status of these high schools. The goal is to compare the performance of students from socioeconomic disadvantaged high schools to students from advantaged high schools. In this research, we find that students from the top 15% high schools ADI percentile pass CS1 at a higher rate with a significant difference.