2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Researchers in Computer Science education are working to identify student features that play a role in course performance. Specifically, researchers identified motivation, certain study behaviors, a sense of belonging, and a growth mindset as essential factors. Most prior work focuses on intro to programming courses. In this work we focus on a Discrete Math course which is a required gateway course in the computing sequence. This course involves conceptual problem solving that requires students to think about a problem and conceptually understand it before starting to work on it. These study behaviors might be new to students and different from study behaviors used in programming courses.

In this work, we aim to replicate prior work and search for a correlation between final grades in our course and motivation. We aim to turn that information into an intervention by offering advice to students on study behaviors that might link to success. We have identified the following research questions regarding students in a Discrete Math class in an introductory CS sequence:

RQ1: Do students' expectations to do well, value of the course, and time spent studying contribute to their course outcome?
RQ2: Can students who do not expect to do well in the course when they first enter it, can nevertheless engage in study behaviors that lead to positive course outcomes?

During Spring 2023 we surveyed 478 students in a Discrete Math course at a large state University. Students answered a questionnaire about their motivation as they enter the course. Students were also given two additional surveys, in the middle and at the end of the term, to measure how much time they spent on each resource. The resources included the textbook, practice problems, office hours, outside resources, lecture notes, and reading solutions.

We found that expectation to do well and intending to put effort into the course contribute to doing well in the course. We found that overall students who spend more time do not do better in the course perhaps because their time is not spent effectively. Yet, students who spend more time on practice exams performed better in the class. This is especially true for students who come into the course with low expectation to do well. This suggests that students can still do well in the course even if they come in without background knowledge. In future work, we plan to examine how we might turn this information into an intervention. We plan to use this to design interventions specifically tailored to our course. We hope that our methodology will be easy to implement and useful to instructors of other conceptual problem-solving classes.