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Self-efficacy and mental models in learning to program

Published: 28 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Learning to program is a unique experience for each student, and it is not fully understood why one person in an introductory programming course learns to program better and more quickly than the next. Self-efficacy is an individual's judgment of his or her ability to perform a task within a specific domain [1]. A mental model is a person's internal (mental) representation of real world objects and systems [9]. Research has shown that high self-efficacy and a good mental model are important to knowledge acquisition and transfer. This research investigates the effects of students' self-efficacy and mental models of programming on learning to program. The results show that self-efficacy for programming is influenced by previous programming experience and increases as a student progresses through an introductory programming course. The results also show that the student's mental model of programming influences self-efficacy and that both the mental model and self-efficacy affect course performance.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE '04: Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
June 2004
296 pages
ISBN:1581138369
DOI:10.1145/1007996
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: 28 June 2004

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  1. learning to program
  2. mental models
  3. self-efficacy

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  • (2024)Designing for Interdisciplinary Transfer to Reduce Intrinsic Cognitive Load, Increase Self-Efficacy, and Promote Conceptual Understanding in Introductory ProgrammingProceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699553(1-13)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Exploring the Relationship between Debugging Self-Efficacy and CASE Tools for Novice TroubleshootingProceedings of the 2024 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research10.1145/3689535.3689556(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
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