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Factors affecting the success of non-majors in learning to program

Published: 01 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The introductory programming course is difficult for many university students, especially students who have little prior exposure to programming. Many factors affecting student success have been identified, but there is still a dearth of knowledge about how key factors combine to affect course outcomes. In this study we develop and empirically test a model integrating three factors of importance in learning to program: previous programming experience, perceived self-efficacy, and knowledge organization. The participants were non-majors. The findings showed that perceived self-efficacy increased significantly during a semester course. Previous experience affected perceived self-efficacy but not knowledge organization. Both perceived self-efficacy and knowledge organization had an effect on the course grade, as well as on success in a specific programming task, debugging. The results on self-efficacy also suggested that the participants were overconfident about their programming capabilities. The contribution of this paper is the identification of the joint effects of an important set of factors for programming success by non-majors.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '05: Proceedings of the first international workshop on Computing education research
October 2005
182 pages
ISBN:1595930434
DOI:10.1145/1089786
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 October 2005

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Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. end-user programmers
  3. knowledge organization
  4. learning to program
  5. non-majors
  6. self-efficacy

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