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A Motivation Guided Holistic Rehabilitation of the First Programming Course

A Motivation Guided Holistic Rehabilitation of the First Programming Course A Motivation Guided Holistic Rehabilitation of the First Programming Course UOLEVI NIKULA, Lappeenranta University of Technology ORLENA GOTEL, Independent Researcher JUSSI KASURINEN, Lappeenranta University of Technology It has been estimated that more than two million students started computing studies in 1999 and 650,000 of them either dropped or failed their rst programming course. For the individual student, dropping such a course can distract from the completion of later courses in a computing curriculum and may even result in changing their course of study to a curriculum without programming. In this article, we report on how we set out to rehabilitate a troubled rst programming course, one for which the dropout statistic and repercussion was evident. The ve-year longitudinal case study described in this article began by systematically tracking the pass rate of a rst programming course, its throughput, as proposed by the Theory of Constraints. The analyses of these data indicated three main problems in the course: programming discipline dif culty, course arrangement complexity, and limited student motivation. The motivation problem was approached from the Two-Factor Theory point of view. It investigated those factors that led to dissatisfaction among the students, the hygiene factors, and those factors that http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) Association for Computing Machinery

A Motivation Guided Holistic Rehabilitation of the First Programming Course

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References (115)

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1946-6226
DOI
10.1145/2048931.2048935
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

A Motivation Guided Holistic Rehabilitation of the First Programming Course UOLEVI NIKULA, Lappeenranta University of Technology ORLENA GOTEL, Independent Researcher JUSSI KASURINEN, Lappeenranta University of Technology It has been estimated that more than two million students started computing studies in 1999 and 650,000 of them either dropped or failed their rst programming course. For the individual student, dropping such a course can distract from the completion of later courses in a computing curriculum and may even result in changing their course of study to a curriculum without programming. In this article, we report on how we set out to rehabilitate a troubled rst programming course, one for which the dropout statistic and repercussion was evident. The ve-year longitudinal case study described in this article began by systematically tracking the pass rate of a rst programming course, its throughput, as proposed by the Theory of Constraints. The analyses of these data indicated three main problems in the course: programming discipline dif culty, course arrangement complexity, and limited student motivation. The motivation problem was approached from the Two-Factor Theory point of view. It investigated those factors that led to dissatisfaction among the students, the hygiene factors, and those factors that

Journal

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Nov 1, 2011

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