New CS1 curricula and pedagogies have resulted in many positive outcomes over the last several years including lower fail rates and increased long-term retention. Given these positive outcomes, the question becomes how much do the traditional factors of prior experience and confidence still play a role in students' performance in and attitudes about these courses? Furthermore, given that increasingly recommended collaborative pedagogies (e.g. pair programming) force students to interact with their peers for a large percentage of their work in the class, how much does the confidence of their peers affect their own attitudes and performance? This paper presents a study investigating these questions. We find that prior experience and confidence still predict success, but only for some students. We also find that student confidence levels have little to no impact on the attitudes and performance of their peers.
