Accruing Interest: What Experiences Contribute to Students Developing a Sustained Interest in Computer Science Over Time?

Abstract

This lightning talk describes a new grant-funded research project investigating how undergraduate computer science students' interest in CS develops. The goal of this project is to investigate how sustained, individual interest develops from finer-grained experiences of situational interest that students have in introductory CS courses. This project will accomplish this goal using the experience sampling method (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007), which is a longitudinal research method that asks participants to report on their immediate experiences at many occasions. Prior research has not adequately investigated what drives individual differences in CS interest at the level at which policymakers and educators can most effectively act, namely, at a situation-to-situation level, rather than in terms of what happens in courses, programs of study, or occupations in general and overall. Moreover, research has shown that some overall factors, such as competence-related beliefs and co-curricular supports, might be related to the development of sustained interest in CS (e.g., Lishinski, Yadav, Good, & Enbody, 2016). Thus, we will explore how students' initial interest, as well as their individual motivational characteristics, such as CS self-concept, and CS self-efficacy, relate to interest at a situation-to-situation level. Furthermore, we will also explore how contextual factors - those internal to students, such as how challenging they found the activities, as well as those external to students, such as the focus of each class - relate to students' situational interest. Overall, we hope to better understand how students' situational interest relates to changes in their longer-term, individual interest.