About the research
Programming education currently begins at the elementary school age, with an increasing number of countries enriching their elementary school education with computing and programming courses. In this research the researchers were interested in the factors that affect the learning performance of young students in programming classes and their view of programming as a career path. To this end, they ran eight-week experimental programming courses, teaching Scratch to 8 to 12 year-old students of elementary schools in the Netherlands The authors explored factors that have been found to affect learning performance in adult, university-level students, including self-efficacy and motivation, and measured how they affect students of this age group. Exploring the students’ view of programming as a career path, they also measured the effects of the course, their performance, and the stereotypes that they assume for computer scientists. The researchers found that students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and previous programming experience are important factors, being strongly correlated with their self-efficacy and their inclination towards a Computer Science (CS) career. For female students only, we also find CS career orientation to be strongly correlated with their self-efficacy. The students appeared unaffected by established stereotypical traits for computer scientists.
About the SIGCSE Technical Symposium
The SIGCSE Technical Symposium is the largest computing education conference worldwide organized by ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. It attracts over 1,500 researchers, educators, and others interested in improving computing education in K-12 and higher education. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium addresses problems common among educators working to develop, implement and/or evaluate computing programs, curricula, and courses. The symposium provides a forum for sharing new ideas for syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy, at all levels of instruction. The symposium provides a diverse selection of technical sessions and opportunities for learning and interaction.
About Fenia Aivaloglou
Dr. ir. Fenia Aivaloglou is assistant professor at the Open Universiteit. Her main research interests are Software Engineering and Programming education. Her published work includes several papers on early computing education, including the paper How Kids Code and How We Know: An Exploratory Study on the Scratch Repository, which she published with Feliene Hermans.
More about the paper
A blog post about their research is available, along with the full paper.