Understanding Sources of Student Struggle in Early Computer Science Courses
Understanding Sources of Student Struggle in Early Computer Science Courses
复制标题
DOI：
10.1145/3446871.3469755
复制
发表时间：
2021-08
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Adrian Salguero;W. Griswold;Christine Alvarado;Leo Porter
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Adrian Salguero;W. Griswold;Christine Alvarado;Leo Porter
计算机科学专业的学生在早期的计算机课程中举步维艰，这表现在高失败率和较差的记忆力上。因此，许多研究试图从认知、元认知和社会情绪等多个角度来刻画学生挣扎的根源。通常，研究将他们的调查局限于一个特定的视角或单一的课程。本文报告了对几门计算机科学课程进行的广泛的学生体验调查的结果。通过定期调查，学生们根据每个障碍在整个学期对他们学习的影响程度，对各种认知障碍、社会情绪障碍、外部障碍、个人障碍和结构性障碍进行了评级。对这些问题的探索性因素分析揭示了四个因素--个人义务、缺乏归属感、课堂困惑和缺乏自信--这些因素反映了学生可能面临的一系列困难。我们分析了这些因素在课程、成绩四分位数和按性别、种族/民族和入学状况细分的人口群体中的流行率。成绩四分位数较低的学生报告在多个因素上的压力水平较高，在大多数因素上，所有四分位数和课程之间存在统计上的显著差异。此外，来自传统上代表不足的群体的学生报告称，在所有四个因素上都更加艰难，这表明他们可能面临着比来自代表群体的同学更多的挑战。总体而言，这些发现表明，学生的挣扎与他们生活中许多领域的压力有关，这表明未来的干预应该针对多个领域的压力。
Computer science students struggle in early computing courses as evinced by high failure rates and poor retention. As such, studies have attempted to characterize the root of student struggles from many perspectives, including cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social emotional. Typically, studies have limited their inquiry to a specific perspective or a single course. This paper reports the results of a broad student experience survey conducted across several computer science courses. Through a periodic survey, students rated various cognitive, socio-emotional, external, personal, and structural barriers in terms of how much each impacted their learning throughout the term. An exploratory factor analysis of these questions revealed four factors—personal obligations, lack of sense of belonging, in-class confusion, and lack of confidence—that capture a range of possible struggles students may face. We analyzed the prevalence of these factors across courses, performance quartiles, and demographic groups broken down by gender, race/ethnicity, and matriculation status. Students in lower performance quartiles report higher stress levels on multiple factors, with statistically significant differences found between all quartiles and courses, for most factors. Moreover, students from traditionally underrepresented groups report struggling more across all four factors, suggesting that they may be facing more challenges than classmates from represented populations. Overall, these findings indicate that student struggles are associated with stresses from many areas of their lives, suggesting that future interventions should target multiple areas of stress.