Student Self-Motivation: Lessons Learned from Teaching First Year Computing

This paper describes a study that profiled student participation in a CS1 course to identify key performance indicators and improve student learning experiences. Existing research has provided many novel teaching strategies while other research has produced findings that argue for stronger links between learning outcomes and teaching and assessment. Prior research generally used surveys as the principal mechanism for metric gathering. The study reported here used a survey instrument but additionally monitored lecture and tutorial attendance, web site access and email traffic as well as employing demographic data to examine students' learning experiences. The learning experience was improved by enhancing the student/teacher interaction in both the lectures and tutorials, mapping learning outcomes to both assessment and teaching and decoupling assessment from feedback. The results suggest that the major factor in determining whether a student passed or failed was self-motivation and willingness to engage in the range of learning activities provided for them