TY - GEN
T1 - Students' initial course motivation and their achievement and retention in college cs1 courses
AU - Shell, Duane F.
AU - Soh, Leen Kiat
AU - Flanigan, Abraham E.
AU - Peteranetz, Markeya S.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2016/2/17
Y1 - 2016/2/17
N2 - The goal of this study was to investigate how students' entering motivation for the course in a suite of CS1 introductory computer science courses was associated with their subsequent course achievement and retention. Courses were tailored for specific student populations (CS majors, engineering majors, business-CS combined honors program). Students' goal orientations (learning, performance, task), perceived instrumentality (endogenous, exog-enous), career connectedness, self-efficacy, and mindsets (growth or fixed) were assessed at the start of the course. Grades were significantly predicted from entering motivation; but prediction was highly variable across courses, ranging from not predicted for the engineering courses to highly predictable for the business-CS honors program. Course withdrawal was significantly predicted. Likelihood of withdrawing was decreased by future time career connectedness and learning approach goal orientation and in-creased by having an incremental theory of intelligence. Findings suggest that CS1 students who set learning approach goals for their classes have better academic outcomes and higher retention. Other motivational beliefs were inconsistent in their impacts and varied by course and student population. Except for students in an honors program, entering motivational beliefs weakly predicted achievement and retention, suggesting that impacts of the course itself on motivation and how motivation changes during the course are perhaps more important than student's initial motiva-Tion.
AB - The goal of this study was to investigate how students' entering motivation for the course in a suite of CS1 introductory computer science courses was associated with their subsequent course achievement and retention. Courses were tailored for specific student populations (CS majors, engineering majors, business-CS combined honors program). Students' goal orientations (learning, performance, task), perceived instrumentality (endogenous, exog-enous), career connectedness, self-efficacy, and mindsets (growth or fixed) were assessed at the start of the course. Grades were significantly predicted from entering motivation; but prediction was highly variable across courses, ranging from not predicted for the engineering courses to highly predictable for the business-CS honors program. Course withdrawal was significantly predicted. Likelihood of withdrawing was decreased by future time career connectedness and learning approach goal orientation and in-creased by having an incremental theory of intelligence. Findings suggest that CS1 students who set learning approach goals for their classes have better academic outcomes and higher retention. Other motivational beliefs were inconsistent in their impacts and varied by course and student population. Except for students in an honors program, entering motivational beliefs weakly predicted achievement and retention, suggesting that impacts of the course itself on motivation and how motivation changes during the course are perhaps more important than student's initial motiva-Tion.
KW - CS1 Achieve-ment
KW - Goal orientation
KW - Retention
KW - Student motivation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84968680254&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84968680254&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2839509.2844606
DO - 10.1145/2839509.2844606
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84968680254
T3 - SIGCSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education
SP - 639
EP - 644
BT - SIGCSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, SIGCSE 2016
Y2 - 2 March 2016 through 5 March 2016
ER -