Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

Self-efficacy, or the belief in one's ability to accomplish a task or achieve a goal, can significantly influence the effectiveness of various instructional methods to induce learning gains. The importance of self-efficacy is particularly pronounced in complex subjects like Computer Science, where students with high self-efficacy are more likely…

Among students and lecturers of Computer Science (CS)-related subjects, there is often anecdotal talk that Frustration Tolerance (FT) is a requirement for success in CS studies or that students would learn it during their studies. In order to relate the anecdotal perception and the psychological concept of FT and to explore the anecdotal…

The impact of a novice programmer's first language on their subsequent achievement in further computing education has been the subject of much study in the field of computer science education. Our research is a retrospective study of more than 10,000 undergraduate students enrolled in CS1 (introduction to computer programming) from 118 US college…

Concept maps have a long history in educational settings as a tool for teaching, learning, and assessing. As an assessment tool, they are predominantly used to extract the structural configuration of learners' knowledge. This article presents an investigation of the knowledge structures of a large group of beginning CS students. The investigation…

This paper reports the results of a survey with 40 students enrolled in an Android Application Development course offered during the spring semester of 2013 and 2014. The course used App Inventor to build the apps and required students to have an introduction to programming course as a prerequisite. The survey asked for demographic information and…

To meet a growing demand and a projected deficit in the supply of computer professionals (NCWIT, 2009), it is of vital importance to expand students' access to computer science. However, many researchers in the computer science education community unproductively assume that some students lack an innate ability for computer science and…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…