Abstract:

Teaching and learning in the educational context has required over time different efforts by students and teachers to ensure a satisfactory process in which the objective of guaranteeing a complete learning process is met. In learning computer programming, students face different challenges, so the role of teachers, in their constant effort to improve, chooses to include innovative strategies through the support of computer technologies in order to facilitate the appropriation of knowledge by the student. There are more and more educational strategies that integrate technological tools of automatic evaluation of online judge type in the programming class methodologies since they allow: motivate the student, promote interest in the topics from practice and competition and improve academic performance. These integrations in programming class methodologies have been reported in the literature to have positive effects in terms of improvement in performance, skills, improvement in logic and participation. However, there is a lack of studies to determine whether motivation, as a learning factor, is affected by the intervention of automatic assessment tools in class sessions.

For this reason, the present article focuses on evaluating the impact on students' learning motivation when using an automatic program assessment tool in a computer programming course. Based on a quasi-experimental research design, the level of learning motivation of students in the experimental group and students in a control group (students who took the course without using the selected automatic evaluation tool) were compared by means of a pretest and posttest with the MSLQ-Colombia instrument. Additionally, the students of the experimental group answered a survey with open-ended questions that allowed collecting the different perceptions about the tool and the integration of this type of strategies in the course methodology.

The data collected allowed us to perform a statistical analysis regarding the variation of learning motivation in the groups that participated. On the one hand, the quantitative data collected through the MSLQ-Colombia did not show significant differences in the motivation of the students in the experimental group in which the automatic evaluation tool was integrated. On the other hand, the qualitative information made it possible to contrast the impact found in the quantitative analysis. The data from the student opinion survey allowed us to observe an increase in the levels of students' expectation for her self-efficacy in academic performance. These results allow a better understanding of the effects of the integration of automatic assessment tools on the learning motivation of computer programming students.

Keywords:

Assessment tools, computer programming, learning motivation.