Contextual factors influencing engineering students' motivation in learning computer programming

Abstract

Having computer programming skills are crucial for engineers. Thus, computer programming has been made a compulsory course for all engineering students. However, computer programming has the reputation of being demotivating and is viewed as not interesting by most engineering students. Consequently, this hampered their learning. Therefore, there is a need to find ways to motivate the engineering students to learn computer programming through appropriate pedagogical approaches that meet students’ motivational needs. This study aims to explore the influence of contextual factors of the learning environment towards engineering students’ motivation in learning computer programming. The studied elements were the contextual factors relating to the learning environment, the students’ motivational beliefs and the students’ behaviours. This naturalistic inquiry research was adopted to gather the data through non-participant observations and semi-structured interviews. The observations were conducted over a period of 14-weeks in three classrooms taught by different lecturers of the introductory computer programming course for first-year engineering students. Eighty-seven students participated in a survey using the Motivated Strategy Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) which later was used to identify the 10 selected interview respondents. The observation and interview data were recorded and transcribed for analysis using thematic analysis technique. The analysis discovered eight contextual factors and motivational beliefs that influence them to study computer programming and they are “Students’ Characteristics”, “Teaching Method”, “Lecturer’s Characteristics”, “Assessment”, “Task Driven Motivation”, “Peer Driven Motivation”, “Involvement” and “Persistent Behaviour”. The findings conclude that there are two significant pedagogical approaches that can help to increase engineering students’ motivation in learning computer programming namely collaborative learning environment and formative assessment.