2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Researchers have found that motivation and sense of belonging play a role in course performance. 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 study behaviors different from those used in programming courses and might affect student sense of belonging and motivation in different ways. Specifically, we focus on two aspects of motivation from Expectancy-Value Theory: students’ expectation for success and the value they place in the course. For sense of belonging, we focus on whether students see themselves as computer scientists, and whether they think their instructors, parents and friends see them as computer scientists.

We have identified the following research questions:

RQ1: To what extent do students’ initial expectancy of success, value for the course, and sense of belonging correlate with their course performance, as measured by final grades?

RQ2: To what extent do students with below-average measures at the start of the course change their attitudes in a way that leads to positive course outcomes?

During Fall 2023 we surveyed over 400 students in a Discrete Math course at a large state R1 University. We measured students’ expectation, value and belonging during the first week of the semester. In the middle of the semester, students were given an intervention that discussed the importance of these attributes and how they can lead to success in the course. Students were then given an additional survey to measure how much they thought these attributes lead to their success in the course so far, and whether each of these attributes increased since the beginning of the year.

We divided the students into those that received a grade of an A,B,C, and D to see whether these groups differed in our measures. To answer RQ1, we found that the A students had higher expectations to do well when they first came into the course. This is perhaps because some students come in with prior background knowledge. However, there was no difference in value or in sense of belonging between the groups. In the middle of the semester, when we asked the students how important their mindset was, there was no difference between these groups, suggesting that across all students, they equally perceived mindset as affecting their outcome. When we asked students which of these measures increased since the beginning of the year, we found that the B students reported an increase in value as compared to the C and D students. Both the A and B students reported an increase in interest as compared to the D students. There was no difference between them and the C students. Only the A students increased in their belonging as compared to the B and C students.

To answer RQ2 we looked at students who started out low on the ‘value’ measure but indicated that their ‘value’ of the course increased. Those students did better than students who started out with low value and did not increase their value of the course. Students who expected to do well in the beginning and increased their interest did the best out of all the students. Increasing their interest for those students who started out with low expectations did not compensate.

These data allow us to study interactions between groups of students based on their initial responses, mid-semester responses, and final grades. This approach allows instructors to design interventions specifically tailored to their courses. We hope that our methodology will be easy to implement and useful to instructors of other conceptual problem-solving classes.