Abstract:

The world market for digitally-related professions is constantly increasing and there is an need to increase diversity in these professions, to ensure that digital products and services reflect society as a whole. Yet, Computer Science (CS) in school faces the same challenges as other STEM subjects, with a loss of motivation among many high-school students and a consequent leakage in the pipeline to university-level studies.

Set in the context of the introduction in the Swiss canton of Vaud of obligatory CS classes for first year high-school students, this research aims to help understand what aspects of introductory CS courses maximize pupil motivation for the subject. We do this by assessing pupil reactions to their CS classes taught using newly created Creative Commons CS resources in the form of a website for teachers and one for students. We explore which features of the resources and the way they are used by teachers are most strongly associated with pupil self-determination for CS study and desire to continue with it.

A cross-sectional, survey study carried out in the Canton of Vaud, Switzerland gathered feedback from 479 pupils (M = 280, F = 199) in the full range of secondary disciplines on their reactions to studying a range of core CS themes (Algorithms, Programming, Representation of Information, Computer architecture). Pupils evaluated three different aspects of the resources and how they were used in class:
(1) baseline “hygiene” factors (levels of difficulty, abstraction, theory versus practice, technical complexity),
(2) study comfort factors (clear objectives, instructions, structure, and rhythm of learning),
(3) active learning factors (problem-solving, collaboration, developing and expressing ideas, links with life and society).

Results of analyses conducted using multi-level mixed effects generalized linear regression analyses, controlling for school, class and demographic factors, revealed that, while student evaluations of baseline level of difficulty factors were significantly associated with ongoing motivation to study CS, when they were the only predictor, their importance in predicting ongoing motivation was dwarfed by study comfort and active-learning factors, once these were introduced into the model.

A closer look shows that the most important factor in predicting ongoing student motivation for CS studies was the degree to which course materials and teacher made explicit links to the daily life of students. The second most important factor was having clear objectives, so students understand why they are studying each theme and piece of content. When combined with descriptive results, we see that levels of student satisfaction with baseline difficulty factors and study comfort factors were positive for the majority of students. However, this was not the case for students’ perceptions of the degree to which their CS classes were relevant to their own lives, with fewer than 50% of students agreeing that this was the case. This highlights the challenge of making CS relevant to teenagers’ lives.

Taken together, these results confirm the importance of taking time to make links between high school CS and the daily life of students if we want to encourage more students to go further in their studies. We discuss how CS course content can help teachers to make these links, using examples from the updated Modulo resources and show how students who may not be innately drawn to CS may be enthused for the subject

Keywords:

Computer science, motivation, high-school, on-line resources, links with life.