Alex Lishinski, Jon Good, and I presented two papers at International Computing Educational Research Conference in Melbourne, Australia.
In the first paper “Learning to Program: Gender Differences and Interactive Effects of Students’ Motivation, Goals and Self-Efficacy on Performance“, Alex will present results from an empirical on examining CS1 students along dimensions of self-regulated learning, and exploring the relationships between these dimensions and course outcomes. 346 students in an introductory programming course completed measures to assess their self-efficacy, metacognitive self-regulation, intrinsic goal orientation, extrinsic goal orientation, performance on code writing assignments, and performance on multiple choice exams. A path analysis model was created, and the results of the model showed that the best predictor of student exam and project performance in CS1 was self-efficacy. Furthermore, the results of the study exhibited evidence for a reciprocal self-efficacy “feedback loop” in which student self-efficacy beliefs influence their course performance which later influences their self-efficacy beliefs which influence later performance. A correlation analysis also demonstrated interesting results by gender. While both genders experienced the self-efficacy feedback loop process, in which self-efficacy beliefs become more accurate, this process appears to happen more quickly with female students than with male students. This suggests that female students internalize performance feedback more quickly than do male students. These results are interesting because they show the importance of self-efficacy in the learning process and that self-efficacy is not a static student characteristic, but one that is continually changing, and in different ways for different groups of students.
In the second paper “Methodological Rigor and Theoretical Foundations of CS Education Research“, Jon will present a literature review of recent CS Education publications. The paper details the results of a literature review of papers from the journal Computer Science Education and the proceedings of the ICER conference from the years 2012-2015. The review focuses on two main elements of the research presented in these papers. First, papers were examined for the extent to which they made use of theoretical frameworks from outside of computer science education, in particular, from education, psychology, and other social sciences. Second, the papers were examined for the rigor of methodological approaches using a number of indicators. The study found that, compared to previous research, recent publications in computer science education are making greater use of theory from outside the CS ED field, but the particular methodological approaches being used are no more rigorous than in results from a decade earlier.
