A Study on the Significance of Students’ Thinking Level to Students’ Performance

Abstract

Abstract Students’ level of thinking can be measured in terms of their problem solving, logical thinking and cognitive skills. The aim of this research is to prove the hypotheses, that the students’ level of thinking is not a significant factor for students to achieve good result in C programming course. This course is a core subject offered to engineering foundation students in Centre of Foundation Studies (CFS), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia. In Malaysian education system, students have been exposed to these three skills during their secondary school in Mathematics subject. Students are expected to possess problem solving, logical thinking and cognitive skills in order to acquire programming skill. In this research, we measure the students’ thinking level as the independent variable. This is achieved by distributing a set of questionnaire to 170 respondents out of 700 students. The questionnaires were evaluated by using rubrics table and the score was based on Likert Scale. Students’ score for the course, which includes the course work and final examination marks, were named as dependant variable. SPSS is used to explore the impact of students’ thinking level as a significant factor to C programming course. In this case study, it is found that the students’ thinking level is not a significant factor to the students’ score in this course.