Sentiments and Performance in an Introductory Programming Course Based on PBL
Suenny Mascarenhas Souza, Roberto A. Bittencourt · 2021
Difficulties in introductory programming courses have been reported by several studies. Some authors associate these difficulties with students' sentiments, such as motivation and engagement, others with the learning approach. Active learning approaches, such as PBL, have been used to stimulate motivation and engagement as well as to improve learning outcomes. However, there is little evidence on learning improvements with this approach as well as its association with students' sentiments in CS1 courses. From this perspective, our study carried out an analysis of a hybrid PBL approach adopted in an introductory programming course for majors seeking to understand how students' performances and sentiments are expressed in this case. We performed an exploratory analysis of students' sentiments and performances to understand the relation of this hybrid approach on these variables throughout the course. We also computed correlations and multiple regressions to understand how sentiments in a PBL approach relate to students' performances. Our results suggest that PBL has a positive effect on students' motivation and engagement, being larger in the former. They also confirm the significance of motivation over learning outcomes, with an emphasis on the confidence and satisfaction categories. Engagement is also significant to learning, with an emphasis on the the dedication category. Finally, students' performances were better in PBL tutorials than in lectures, but we found no significant correlation between performance in PBL tutorials and a language-independent CS1 concept inventory.