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“EXCELLENCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE” P A G E 99 Teaching a First-level Programming Course: Strategies for Improving Students’ Performance The School of Technical and Vocational Education at the University of Technology, Jamaica, offers a programme in Computing with Accounting. Graduates should be able to teach Accounting and Computing at the CXC, CAPE, GCE O’ Level and A’ Levels. The programme has several Computing courses, Accounting courses, Educational Theory, Mathematics and General Education courses. The Computing courses in the programme are taught by lecturers from the School of Computing and Information Technology (SCIT), and the Accounting and Education courses are taught by lecturers from the School of Technical and Vocational Education (SOTAVE). For many years the students of the programme have performed poorly in the course Programming Using C. An analysis of the pass rate shows a low percentage of passes each year, usually below 50 per cent. The School has recognized that there are problems with this area. Initiatives to address the problem include: • providing more lab time for students. In the early days students were not allocated lab time but were expected to use the lab on their own initiative as the course required. At present each student is allocated three hours of lab each week. • lecturers supervising the labs. Labs were at first monitored by technicians. All labs for this course are now supervised for one hour by a lecturer. • changing the lecturer. The groups have been taught by different lecturers from the SCIT. • Pooling the lecture group for standardized delivery. Initially this group had separate lectures. Recently they were pooled with the other Computing students, in an effort to standardize the lectures and to have more student-to-students interaction. Althoughwe havemade these changes the performance level of the students on the course has not really improved. If these student teachers are to teach Programming well in the high schools then they must have a good appreciation of the content area. They should have a good programming experience and want to pass on their knowledge to their students. In an effort to further assess the factors contributing to the students’ performance an action research team was formed. The team took on the mandate of gathering information from the course participants and implementing changes to address relevant areas. What follows is a report of the team’s activities and the students’ responses. Sophia McNamarah & Richard Pryce School of Computing and Information Technology Editor’s Note: This research was published in the Journal of Arts, Science and Technology, Volume 1, 2004.