Assessing Basic Computer Skills: A Study of Computer Science First-Year Students in Higher Education

This research-to-practice full paper looks into how first-year students at a Portuguese higher education institution respond to a Basic Informatic Skills tool. This instrument is used to help the industry better understand the students' preparedness and the domain of critical skills for success in Information Technology (IT) specialized workers. As this instrument has a set of questions regarding mathematical knowledge, problem-solving ability, and logical reasoning, and we believe solid mathematical preparation is essential to succeeding in a computer engineering degree program and career, we applied it to determine how well-prepared students are in mathematics skills at the entrance of a computer engineering degree. The test measures six subscales to identify critical competencies in IT: verbal comprehension, numerical aptitude, attention and resistance to monotony, logical reasoning, coding analysis capacity, and diagrammatic reasoning. In general, the student's verbal, numerical, numbers series and code skills of the used instrument (Basic Informatic Skills) were reasonable. Only the attention scale was worse, and the diagram capacity was better. There were only slight gender differences in the average coding and diagrammatic reasoning abilities. Aside from a slight correlation with numerical skills, age did not significantly correlate with any skills. We also determined the correlation among the instrument's several scales and several mathematical subjects, but no correlations were found. This study promoted reflections on the background of students entering a higher computer engineering degree in relation to mathematically based skills considered fundamental for any engineering course. These aspects lead to considering the effort that must be made in the teaching provided to fill these gaps so that students can achieve academic success with a set of curricular units and ultimately prepare them for the marketplace.