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The Impact of Self-Theories to Academic Achievement and Soft Skills in Undergraduate CS Studies: First Findings

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

There is strong evidence of the impact of self-theories to students' academic achievement and behavior in many domains of education, including CS. However, the research on self-theories in CSE are far from conclusive. In this research, we studied 1st year CS and CE students' self-theories and looked at associations to academic achievement in their first courses, as well as the students' conceptualisations of intelligence. Contradictory to previous research, students with a fixed view on intelligence received the best exam scores. Students' conceptualisations of intelligence were found to lean towards cognitive g-theories of intelligence. These initial findings show a number of crucially important future research directions in relation to self-theories, soft skills development, and academic achievement in CS studies.

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  1. The Impact of Self-Theories to Academic Achievement and Soft Skills in Undergraduate CS Studies: First Findings

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
      July 2019
      583 pages
      ISBN:9781450368957
      DOI:10.1145/3304221
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 02 July 2019

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      Author Tags

      1. collaboration
      2. computer science education
      3. computing education
      4. educational psychology
      5. implicit theories
      6. mindset
      7. motivation
      8. self-theories
      9. social skills
      10. soft skills
      11. stem
      12. technology education

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