"Programming is a complex cognitive skill that develops over an extended period of time. The development of programming ability in introductory computer science courses has been found to be associated with a number of student factors, including cognitive, affective, and dispositional factors. Prior research on the student factors that are associated with success in programming has examined them in isolation from one another, and detailed pictures of the interactions of these factors over time are nonexistent. This dissertation focuses on building a detailed model of the factors that contribute to students' learning outcomes in programming. This study collected data from 612 students enrolled in an introductory programming course on a number of cognitive, motivational, affective, and dispositional factors over the course of a semester. Students completed measures of problem solving ability, metacognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, goal orientation, emotional responses, and personality traits. Path analysis and multiple regression were used to examine relationships between these student factors and course learning outcomes from exams and projects. The data analysis was used to determine how these student factors interact with one another and relate to student learning outcomes, and to determine which of these factors had the largest association with course outcomes. This study also examined the influence of students' emotional responses to programming projects. Structural equation models were used to determine whether there were reciprocal effects between emotional responses and project outcomes. Finally, this study also investigated the influence of students completing a programming self-evaluation task on their project scores and self-efficacy. The results of this study demonstrated that problem solving ability was the biggest predictor of students' performance on both project and exam scores, whereas conscientiousness and extraversion were significantly associated with project and exam scores respectively. When all factors were considered simultaneously, problem solving ability was the strongest significant predictor of both project and exam score outcomes, and conscientiousness also significantly predicted project scores. The results of this study also discovered reciprocal effects between students' self-efficacy beliefs and their project outcomes. Finally, the self-evaluation intervention provided evidence of a positive impact on students' project outcomes during the intervention period, but no evidence of impact on students' self-efficacy. These results provide CS education researchers with evidence on which student factors are related to programming learning outcomes, when cognitive, affective, and dispositional factors are considered together."--Pages ii-iii.
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