Undergraduate Students' Struggles in Computer Science

Computing Education Research (CER) has made valuable contributions to improving undergraduate computing. CER tends to focus on instructional challenges, developing tools and techniques for teaching, or researching a single institution or classroom experience, and as a result, may lack a student-first perspective. To identify if there were student concerns that current research was overlooking, we designed an open-ended survey that asked undergraduate computing students what struggles they experienced and how they solved or coped with those struggles. This paper reports on this survey with N=201 responses from 45 US institutions.Our analysis identified two primary factors in student concerns: social/personal and academic/structural. Many of the top concerns of students aligned with trends in CER literature; however, there were issues, particularly those related to structural factors (curriculum, lengthy content, lack of institutional support, and uninterested professors), that have little representation in CER literature. Many of these issues may have temporal context, suggesting ongoing data collection from students may help identify appropriate directions and trends for CER. While we know students struggle in many ways, this survey provides evidence that further research in areas that are pressing today may be under-addressed.