Reliability and Predictive Validity of the Self-regulation Programming Strategies Questionnaire

Abstract

Educational software has often been used to promote self-regulated learning (SRL), a psychological construct associated with improved academic performance. In introductory programming education, high-performing students often present a solid use of SRL strategies, which aroused the interest of educators and researchers in studying this phenomenon. A typical procedure in research grounded on the SRL theory is the measurement of students’ regulatory abilities. For example, to assess modifications in SRL behavior after exposure to computer-based scaffoldings. Due to the lack of instruments that measure specific regulatory strategies related to programming learning, the Self-Regulation Programming Strategies Questionnaire (SPSQ) was developed by Lu et al. The use of this instrument depends upon its reliability and validity, aspects measured by psychometrics replications, which is missing and is our objective in this work. Ninety-five undergraduate computer science students from Macao participated in this investigation. The findings point to the SPSQ’s reliability and validity, and our study goes further by providing a confirmatory factor analysis of this instrument, which was absent in the original study.