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At our comprehensive liberal arts college, we offer a 2-credit hour CS1 course for engineering majors that includes all of the standard learning objectives of a typical 4-credit hour course. To help the students learn the course material in this compressed time frame, we switched our programming language from C++ to Python, and we replaced weekly homework assignments with labs and online problem sets. All other factors in the course were unchanged, including instructor, course and weekly learning objectives, tests, grading criteria, pedagogical style, and even textbook (the textbook came in two versions -- a C++ version and a Python version). This transition offered a unique opportunity to observe, compare, and measure student learning outcomes across the two semesters. Our measured results show a moderate but statistically significantly improvement from the semester using C++ and homework assignments to the semester using Python and online problem sets.
Norman et al. (2015) studied this question.