Examining attendance, performance and interest in a CS course in relation to students’ achievement goal orientation and self-evaluation

Abstract

There has been a lot of research related to the prediction of students’ interest in a course and course performance. The findings are especially important for those fields (and courses) with high failure and dropout rates, such as computer science. Although many research in computer science education involve various motivational and learning strategy frameworks (like achievement goal orientation and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire – MSLQ), very few involve interest, attendance and self-evaluation. In this study, the aim was to see whether students’ achievement goal orientation and self- evaluation of their pre-faculty programming knowledge are related to course performance, attendance and interest in an introductory computer science course. Additionally, we wanted to see if attendance and interest relate to course performance. The findings suggest that only task-approach has a positive correlation with final test scores (but not with mid-term test scores), and that all AGO constructs except other-avoidance correlate positively with interest. Also, attendance has a positive correlation with mid-term test scores (but not with final test scores) while interest has a positive correlation with both mid-term and final test scores. Finally, we suspect that attendance and mid-term test findings may be somewhat influenced by course and faculty policies.