Exploring Students' Self-Confidence in Their Programming Solutions
Sven Strickroth · 2024
Learning programming is perceived as hard by many students. To support students, many e-assessment and intelligent tutoring systems have been developed. These systems can automatically evaluate student submissions and provide feedback. Despite comprehensive research on feedback modalities, little is known about students' confidence in the correctness of their submissions when requesting feedback. Also, educators hope that students get more confident and that automatically provided feedback helps students to improve and better self-assess their work. In this paper, first-semester students are asked about their confidence in passing a requested syntax or function test before the test results are revealed to them. Students can request feedback from each of the two provided test types twice in arbitrary order. The self-rated confidence, test outcomes, time needed to enter the confidence, and correlations are analyzed in detail. The results show that the majority of students has a high confidence in their submitted work. However, students frequently over-estimate the correctness and only few under-estimate it. There is a correlation between students' confidence in their submissions and their actual performance, but this cannot be used to make reliable predictions. The test pass rate for highly confident students is higher for syntax tests than for function tests and students need more time for entering their confidence for syntax than for function tests. Over the semester, the self-rated confidence decreases. When tests are reattempted, both correctness and self-assessment abilities show improvement.