Impact of Major Backgrounds on Student Learning Achievement: A Case Study for Java Programming Course

Due to the rapidly increasing number of students at universities in recent years, universities may arrange students from different majors in the same class, which may bring several challenges in teaching and learning for students and teachers, such as poor class experience, less class discussion and more workload for teachers. In this paper, we investigate the learning achievements of students with different major backgrounds based on a large-size course of Introduction to Java Programming. Approaches of difficulty index, incrimination index, failure rate, median average mark, average mark and standard deviation are used to evaluate students’ learning achievements based on students’ coursework assignments, continuous assessment and the final exam. Results show that major backgrounds could significantly affect learning achievements even in the same teaching and learning environment. To achieve a better learning experience and performance, we finally divided the original module into two separate modules for students with different major backgrounds.