{"title":"CS1: Intrinsic Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Effort","authors":"Antti-Jussi Lakanen, Ville Isomöttönen","doi":"10.15388/infedu.2023.26","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This research investigates university students’ success in their first programming course (CS1) in relation to their motivation, mathematical ability, programming self-efficacy, and initial goal setting. To our knowledge, these constructs have not been measured in a single study before in the Finnish context. The selection of the constructs is in line with the statistical model that predicts student performance (“PreSS”) (Quille and Bergin, 2018). The constructs are compared with various demographic and background variables, such as study major, prior programming experience, and average weekly working hours. Some of the main results of this study are as follows: (1) students generally entered with a high interest in programming and high motivation, but these factors did not increase during the course, i.e., interest in programming did not increase. (2) Having prior experience yielded higher initial programming self-efficacy, grade expectations, and spending less time on tasks, but not better grades (although worse neither). While these results can be seen as preliminary (and alarming in some parts), they give rise to future research for investigating possible expectation–performance gaps in CS1 and later CS studies. As our dataset accumulates, we also hope to be able to construct a valid success prediction model.","PeriodicalId":45270,"journal":{"name":"Informatics in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Informatics in Education","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.15388/infedu.2023.26","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This research investigates university students’ success in their first programming course (CS1) in relation to their motivation, mathematical ability, programming self-efficacy, and initial goal setting. To our knowledge, these constructs have not been measured in a single study before in the Finnish context. The selection of the constructs is in line with the statistical model that predicts student performance (“PreSS”) (Quille and Bergin, 2018). The constructs are compared with various demographic and background variables, such as study major, prior programming experience, and average weekly working hours. Some of the main results of this study are as follows: (1) students generally entered with a high interest in programming and high motivation, but these factors did not increase during the course, i.e., interest in programming did not increase. (2) Having prior experience yielded higher initial programming self-efficacy, grade expectations, and spending less time on tasks, but not better grades (although worse neither). While these results can be seen as preliminary (and alarming in some parts), they give rise to future research for investigating possible expectation–performance gaps in CS1 and later CS studies. As our dataset accumulates, we also hope to be able to construct a valid success prediction model.
期刊介绍:
INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION publishes original articles about theoretical, experimental and methodological studies in the fields of informatics (computer science) education and educational applications of information technology, ranging from primary to tertiary education. Multidisciplinary research studies that enhance our understanding of how theoretical and technological innovations translate into educational practice are most welcome. We are particularly interested in work at boundaries, both the boundaries of informatics and of education. The topics covered by INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION will range across diverse aspects of informatics (computer science) education research including: empirical studies, including composing different approaches to teach various subjects, studying availability of various concepts at a given age, measuring knowledge transfer and skills developed, addressing gender issues, etc. statistical research on big data related to informatics (computer science) activities including e.g. research on assessment, online teaching, competitions, etc. educational engineering focusing mainly on developing high quality original teaching sequences of different informatics (computer science) topics that offer new, successful ways for knowledge transfer and development of computational thinking machine learning of student''s behavior including the use of information technology to observe students in the learning process and discovering clusters of their working design and evaluation of educational tools that apply information technology in novel ways.