Earning Open Badges instead of regular grades and credits can be a motivating factor for high-performing students in terms of attending classes and completing assignments in extracurricular courses, but to what extent? And for what student profiles? To tackle these questions, we conducted a quantitative study with high-performing students. Each…

Several studies have explored the factors that influence self-efficacy as well as its contribution to academic development in online learning environments in recent years. However, little research has investigated the effect of a web-based learning environment on enhancing students' beliefs about self-efficacy for learning. This is especially…

Procedural problem solving is an important skill in most technical domains, like programming, but many students reach problem solving impasses and flounder. In most formal learning environments, instructors help students to overcome problem solving impasses by scaffolding initial problem solving. Relying on this type of personalized interaction,…

Programming skills have gained increasing attention in recent years because digital technologies have become an indispensable part of life. However, little is known about the roles of fade-in and fade-out scaffolding in online collaborative programming settings. To close this research gap, the present study aims to examine the roles of fade-in and…

Computer programming is a skill of increasing importance in scientific and technological fields. However, in introductory computer science (CS1) courses in higher education, approximately one in every three students fails. A common reason is that students are overwhelmed by an accelerated and inflexible pace of learning that jeopardizes success.…

As online learning has become an inevitable trend in the post-peak era of the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed pair programming (DPP) is gaining momentum in both education and industry. DDP serves as a collaborative programming approach and also benefits the development of computational thinking, a fundamental skill in today's world. This study…