Abstract
The difficulties of many students in introductory programming courses and the consequent failure and drop out make it necessary to look for motivation strategies for them to be successful. One of the strategies that is touted in the literature is self-assessment to compromise and motivate students. As we had doubts about the possibility of this strategy, we did an experiment and asked the students to predict the grades of the two tests and the two projects during a semester. Even knowing the correction grid and exercises that involve programming languages, which shows the result to the programmer, we found that the students' forecasts were not very accurate. In the first test we found that the worst students said they were going to get reasonable grades and much better than reality, while the best students thought they had worse grades than they actually had. The other moments of evaluation did not have as severe results, but forecasts continued to be inaccurate. We did tests by gender, by age, for being a freshman or not, for having taken a computer course in high school and for previous knowledge of programming languages: none of these variables proved to be as significant as the students' grades and their corresponding insecurity-fear or optimism-unconscious.
Highlights
CS1 is the designation widely used for introduction to programming courses in computer science major since ACM's 1978 Computing Curricula [1]
The maximum age was 34 and the minimum was 18, with 81% of the students being 18, 19 or 20 years old. 19 students had a computer science course in secondary education: 14 attended computer applications B on the 12th year, four Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the 9th year and a Web Design on the 10th, 11th and 12th years. 19 students replied that they had some programming knowledge, having referred to Java, JavaScript, C #, C, Pascal, HTML and CSS, Visual Basic and Python
It is known from literature that there is a great difficulty for students to be able to predict their grades
Summary
CS1 (computer science 1) is the designation widely used for introduction to programming courses in computer science major since ACM's 1978 Computing Curricula [1]. Teaching how to program is a task that proves to be complicated since some students love it and can succeed others feel that it is almost impossible to be able to pass the course, which often leads them to abandon it [2], [3]. Some methods and strategies have been extensively studied and tried to motivate students who do not have the internal strength to succeed: active methodologies [7]-[9], project based learning [10], agile methodology such as SCRUM [11], [12], pair programming [13] and many others [14], [15]. This article tries to assess the possibility of using self-assessment as one of the strategies in teaching programming to freshman university students
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