Remedying Low Student Performance in Introductory Programming: A Case Study on Role Assignment in Academic Teams

This article presents the assignment of specific roles to team members for the development of a software application in the Introduction to Computer Programming course, taught in the first semester of an Engineering school. These courses are characterized by complexity and difficulty for various reasons. First-year students tend to have low performance and low participation in exams, despite the lectures offered, mandatory lab attendance, and optional participation in midterm assessment. The teams consisted of three members, with roles assigned as Data Scientist, Programmer, and Analyst. The results indicate a positive relation between teamwork with assigned roles and exam participation, as well as an improvement in student performance. Given that, in our country, individual student progress is not systematically studied for reasons beyond the scope of this paper, we took the initiative to analyze student performance over four years during the initial stage of this pilot implementation. The findings, among others, serve as a starting point for further discussion, study, and research.