Student motivations and goals for CS1: Themes and variations

David Liben-Nowell, Anna Rafferty

Abstract:

Students come to CS1 with a wide variety of motivations and goals,
which may differ across subpopulations and be indicative of their
future engagement with CS. While there is a rich literature re-
lating success in CS1 to specific constructs, such as belonging,
goal-orientation, or self-efficacy, less work has examined what
motivations and goals students volunteer as most important for
their enrollment in CS1. Here, we use qualitative coding to identify
themes from students’ open-ended descriptions of why they’re tak-
ing CS1 and what they hope to get out of it, collected across fifteen
years. Using quantitative analysis of these coded descriptions, and
word-frequency analysis, we identify and name three clusters of
students that encompass the majority of students taking CS1: Ex-
plorers, Planners, and Utilitarians. We also identify motivations and
goals that are more common for particular populations, such as stu-
dents who have not yet declared a major or students without prior
programming experience, as well as factors predicting students’
later engagement with CS. This work demonstrates the potential of
qualitative coding and computational analyses to enable us to better
understand a population of students based on their own words.