Topic Difficulty in a Python Data Structures Course: Student Perceptions and Performance

Few studies examine students' challenges learning data structures, and none investigate student perceptions of what makes data structures difficult or not. We administered common final exam questions to evaluate data structures competence to 189 students over three semesters of the Introduction to Data Structures course at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. We analyze statistically students' exam performance and subjective ratings of the conceptual and implementation difficulty of eight data structures topics. We performed a qualitative analysis to identify themes in student feedback on what made topics conceptually difficult or easy.