An examination of middle school student learner characteristics as related to the reuse and remixing of code in two different computer science learning contexts

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine how two groups of middle school students’ self-efficacy, interest, goal orientation, and prior experience related to evidence of their building upon existing ideas and code in digital artifacts they created using MIT’s App Inventor, a computational practice that Brennan and Resnick (2012) identified as “reusing and remixing.” Participants included 110 students in a formal computer science education course and 87 students in an after-school computing club. Data sources included a learner profile survey and participants’ digital artifacts. Correlational analysis, followed by logistic regression analysis, uncovered significant relationships between self-efficacy, goal orientation, and evidence of participants’ code-oriented reusing and remixing their digital artifacts.