- Title
- Confirmation Bias and Other Flaws in Citing Pass Rate Studies
- Creator
- Simon; Luxton-Reilly, Andrew; Adelakun-Adeyemo, Oluwatoyin
- Relation
- ITiCSE 2021: 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (Virtual, Germany 26 June, 2021 - 01 July, 2021) p. 575-581
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456357
- Publisher
- ACM
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- There have been four principal studies on pass rates in introductory programming courses, in 2007, 2014, and two in 2019. These studies, the first two in particular, are extremely widely cited, but it appears that some of the citing papers misrepresent what was written in the original papers. We present an analysis of nearly 600 papers that cite one or more of these four papers, indicating what sorts of message they impute to the papers. We find that well over half of the citing papers fail to accurately represent the papers' findings, instead citing the papers as evidence either of a commonly accepted belief or of their own - sometimes quite bizarre - assertions. This raises significant concerns for the computing education community: for authors, reviewers, and readers. To help ensure the legitimacy of our discipline we suggest that when authors intend to cite a paper as evidence of some assertion, they carefully read the paper and confirm that it does actually include that assertion; and also confirm that the paper actually establishes the assertion rather than, for example, presenting it as hearsay or as a common belief.
- Subject
- cs1; introductory programming; pass rate; failure rate; dropout rate
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1435852
- Identifier
- uon:39842
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781450382144
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
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