Abstract—This paper is an evaluation study to improve
female student retention in Computer Science during the first
programming course. Although, colleges are using variety of
ways to attract female students to continue their studies in
Computer Science, the number of female students is decreasing
in the major. Therefore, we have employed two survey studies
to learn more about the lack of supported items in the major
and tried to address most of those issues in the classroom to see
the change in student’s feeling about Computer Science.
Moreover, we support some of our suggestions not only by the
survey results, but also students’ performance from the course.
We observed that lack of communication among students and
with faculty, primitive programming editors, and not well
prepared course materials are some of the reasons for the
decrease in female student retention.
Index Terms—Computer science, female students,
programming languages, retention.
The authors are with Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX77341
USA (e-mail: hxv002@shsu.edu, cvarol@shsu.edu).
Cite: Hacer Varol and Cihan Varol, "Improving Female Student Retention in Computer Science during the First Programming Course," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 394-398, 2014.