Statistical Analysis for Evaluation and Improvement of Computer Science Education

Abstract

Developing well-prepared and competent graduates is one of the main goals of all university programs globally. Recently, Computer Science (CS) has achieved tremendous success among all career fields driven by the strong competence in the market and the rapid changes in technology. Our goal is to develop an automated framework that provides efficient management, evaluation and improvement of the CS students education, as well as a profound establishment of a successful study tree for CS university programs. Such a challenging goal comprises major factors that should be inclusively considered. High school (HS) students are expected to join CS university programs with different educational backgrounds and learning capabilities. The strength of association among several performance-related factors including the academic performance of students in HS is evaluated to gain insights and infer indicators in CS programs. The automatic correlational analysis of the prerequisites for each course is also investigated to assess the program structure and dependencies among several CS courses. In this comprehensive study, all these factors are efficiently analyzed in order to investigate the valid causes of low and high performance of both CS university students and programs. Experimental results have concluded several major findings with validated associations that assure and prioritize the importance of evaluation and improvement of CS education.