Exploring students’ identity development from the perspective of study difficulties

Abstract

This work-in-progress paper in research category reports preliminary findings on how students taking introductory computing courses develop identity from the perspective of study difficulties. The motivation was that students identified lack of meaning and prospects (cf. identity) as a study difficulty in a previous qualitative study. The present study further explores this finding by issuing both an identity development and a selfefficacy scale to a larger first-year student cohort. The aim is to characterize the study cohort by the aspects included in the identity development scale, and thereby increase understandings of students' challenges. Moreover, a correlation analysis between identity development and self-efficacy was performed to explore if, for instance, low self-efficacy related to yet a loose identity choice. We also examined the effect of age. Main observations included that many students showed ruminative exploration of identity, which was negatively associated with self-efficacy. Altogether, a rather high number of negative and neutral responses with respect to the identity choice was observed. An initial look at self-efficacy distributions suggests that students related to challenge positively, while a large number of neutral answers were found with respect to the dimension of Effort. This might be indicative of uncertainty about doing the work. Regarding the effect of age, younger students were observed to worry more about the future compared to older students.

CS1: Intrinsic Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Effort

“…We can compare the observations and attributes in these two studies with other kinds of results. Isomöttönen et al (2020) investigated students' identity development and found that many students currently studying on a first programming course doubted or were uncertain of the direction of their lives. Furthermore, Jones et al (2010) observed a decrease in several attributes (expectancy, interest, utility, self-efficacy, attainment, identification) during first-year engineering studies.…”