First Programming Course: Perception and Performance of Students

Teaching students their first computer-programming course is always
a challenge. At Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) a significant number
of failures at the end of every semester indicates that this problem urgently
needs to be addressed in order to identify the root cause(s) and possibly the
solution(s). Hence, as an attempt to carefully look into this problem, the authors
have initiated a study on the students who are enrolled in their first
programming course at UTP. The study is aimed to answer three questions:
Does the students’ initial perceptions towards computer programming change
throughout the semester? If they do, what are the major contributors? And, does
the change from initial to final perceptions reflects the students’ performance?
This paper reports the findings based on two sets of questionnaires distributed
to the students on their first and last class sessions of the semester. The findings
show a significant change in the students’ perception with the major contributor
to the change is the instructor, while the least is the students themselves.
Perception however, does not influence performance.