Through reviewing the background research, and by talking to lecturers and staff working on the
departmental research, a number of areas of interest were identified for investigation by this project. It
was not clear which of these factors, if any, were likely to be good predictors of failure, and so a large
number of variables were identified for analysis in the hope of gaining a clear picture about
performance in first year Computing Science. Appropriate psychological collection tools were chosen
to gather this data (interviews and questionnaires)