Factors Affecting Course Outcomes in Introductory Programming

Learning to program is difficult for many students. Although several factors that affect learning to program have been identified over the years, we are still far from a full understanding of why some students learn to program easily and quickly while others flounder. Two constructs that may affect learning to program are self-efficacy and mental models. Self-efficacy is the individual’s judgment of his or her ability to perform a task in a specific domain (Bandura 1986). A mental model is a person’s internal (mental) representation of real world objects and systems (Norman 1983). Separate research on self-efficacy and mental models has shown that both are important to knowledge acquisition and transfer. Using a path-analytic approach, this research investigates the joint effects of self-efficacy, mental model, and previous experience on learning to program in an introductory course. The results show that self-efficacy for programming is influenced by previous programming experience, and student self-efficacy increases substantially during an introductory programming course. Furthermore, students’ mental models of programming influence their self-efficacy, and both the mental model and self-efficacy have a direct effect on overall success in an introductory course.