On the Effect of Onboarding Computing Students without Programming-Confidence or -Experience

Previous work demonstrates that students without prior programming experience are worse off than their programming experienced peers in terms of both Introductory Programming (CS1) grades and dropout rates. Many universities, therefore, offer an onboarding (CS0) course aimed at bridging the programming experience gap by teaching the basics of programming to inexperienced students. This paper reports on the effects of providing a three-day elective onboarding course over a period of five years (2016–2020), involving a total of N=798 software development students at the IT University of Copenhagen. The paper compares 271 students who attended versus a baseline of 527 who did not attend the onboarding course. The results show that programming inexperienced students are indeed able to “catch up” to the level of their experienced peers both in terms of CS1 grades and dropout rates. Aside from objectively increasing competence, the onboarding also increases confidence, self-efficacy and diminishes insecurities, according to onboarded participants. Finally, the results suggest that onboarding has the potential to increase the diversity of students.