In search of experimental evidence on Scratch programming and students? achievements in the first-year college computing class? Consider these datasets

This article presents datasets representing the demograph-ics and achievements of computer science students in their first programming courses (CS1). They were collected from a research project comparing the effects of a construction-ist Scratch programming and the conventional instructions on the achievements of CS1 students from selected Nige-rian public colleges. The project consisted of two consecu-tive quasi-experiments. In both cases, we adopted a non-equivalent pretest-posttest control group design and multi-stage sampling. Institutions were selected following purpo-sive sampling, and those selected were randomly assigned to the Scratch programming class (experimental) and the con-ventional (comparison) class. A questionnaire and pre-and post-introductory programming achievement tests were used to collect data. To strengthen the research design, we used the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) algorithm to create matched samples from the unmatched data obtained from both experiments. Future studies can use these data to identify the factors influ-encing CS1 students' performance, investigate how program-ming pedagogies or tools affect CS1 students' achievements in higher education, identify important trends using machine learning techniques, and address additional research ideas.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)