The Impact of High School Region Socioeconomic Status on Computer Science Student Performance

Research in computing education has been steered towards understanding early indicators of what leads students to succeed in introductory programming courses (CS1). A major finding of these research efforts has been the impact that high school courses and prior programming experience have in predicting success in a post-secondary CS1. However, the socioeconomic status surrounding CS1 students has not been well explored as an indicator of performance. Specifically, a student's high school socioeconomic status (SES) has not been well investigated in this area, despite the intuition that more socioeconomically advantaged high schools will better prepare students for college computing courses. In this research, we propose a method to examine a student's prior high school regional socioeconomic status and determine whether this SES has a correlation to their post-secondary CS1 performance. This paper investigates the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, census tract, and county the high school resides. To understand the socioeconomic statuses of these regions, we utilize multiple socioeconomic indices such as the Area Deprivation Index and the Social Deprivation Index. Some of the factors that create a deprivation index are the housing values of the region, poverty rate, adult educational completion, and household resources. After proposing a method to examine if there are any correlations between a student's attended high school regional SES and the student's performance in CS1, we perform a case study using seven years of CS1 student records from our institution. From the 4863 student records we use in this study, our initial findings indicate that students from more advantaged high school regions tend to pass CS1 more frequently across all surrounding region sizes we examined. Since our findings indicate that high school regional socioeconomic status may be a factor in a student's performance, we argue that future computing education researchers should consider a student's SES as a demographic factor of course performance in order to advocate for interventions that mitigate this disparity gap.