Learning Style and Factors Contributing to Success in an Introductory Computer Science Course

Authors:
James Allert
Affiliations:
University of Minnesota Duluth
Venue:
ICALT '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Year:
2004

Citing 0
Cited 6

An investigation into student characteristics affecting novice programming performance

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
Personality types, learning styles, and an agile approach to software engineering education

Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Using Soloman-Felder Learning Style Index to Evaluate Pedagogical Resources for Introductory Programming Classes

ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
Abstraction ability as an indicator of success for learning computing science?

ICER '08 Proceedings of the Fourth international Workshop on Computing Education Research
Learning styles: novices decide

ITiCSE '09 Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Also "your" job to learn!: helping students to reflect on their learning progress

Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

An introductory course in computer science (CS1) is required of virtually all engineering majors at the University of Minnesota Duluth. From 2001-present an extensive battery of visualization software was developed for this course. Students consistently ranked the visualization software as more important to their learning than any other element of the course. However, these rankings were not highly correlated with actual outcomes. This study of learning style determined that reflective and verbal learners outperformed active and visual ones. Student opinions of the value of programming projects and lectures rank highest and seem to cut across learning style preference. Background familiarity with computers and software was not a strong correlate, although involvement in computer and video gaming was found to be negatively correlated with course success.