Learning to program – does it matter where you sit in the lecture theatre?

Seating position in university lectures is commonly linked with student grade performance. Sitting at the front of lecture theatre is generally reported to have a positive effect on final grade. This study investigates and analyses the seating positions, course engagement, prior programming experiences and academic abilities of students throughout a 12 week Java programming university programme and relates these themes to the students’ final grade performances. Unlike other studies in this area it did not control the students’ seating arrangements. This required the development of a mobile and web based software tracking system which enabled a unique unrestricted study of the effects of lecture theatre seating on assessment performance. It finds that the best assessment results were achieved by the students in the front row and that assessment score degraded the further students sat from the front. While the most engaged were found to regularly sit at the front the same was not true for the most academically able or those with the greatest prior programming experience.