Factors Affecting the Success of Non-Majors in Learning to Program

摘要

The introductory programming course is difficult for manyrnuniversity students, especially students who have little priorrnexposure to programming. Many factors affecting student successrnhave been identified, but there is still a dearth of knowledge aboutrnhow key factors combine to affect course outcomes. In this studyrnwe develop and empirically test a model integrating three factorsrnof importance in learning to program: previous programmingrnexperience, perceived self-efficacy, and knowledge organization.rnThe participants were non-majors. The findings showed thatrnperceived self-efficacy increased significantly during a semesterrncourse. Previous experience affected perceived self-efficacy butrnnot knowledge organization. Both perceived self-efficacy andrnknowledge organization had an effect on the course grade, as wellrnas on success in a specific programming task, debugging. Thernresults on self-efficacy also suggested that the participants werernoverconfident about their programming capabilities. Therncontribution of this paper is the identification of the joint effectsrnof an important set of factors for programming success by nonmajors.