Perserverance measures and attainment in first year computing science students.

McDermott, Roger; Daniels, Mats; Cajander, �sa

Abstract

We investigate the link between concepts of perseverance such as conscientiousness and grit, and the academic attainment of first year computing students. We review the role that perseverance plays in learning models, as well as describing the trait of conscientiousness in the Five Factor Model of personality. We outline research that links this trait with academic success, before focussing on more recent, narrower conceptualisations of perseverance such as academic tenacity and grit. We describe one of the questionnaire tools that have been used to assess the construct of grit. We give details of an investigation that looked for correlations between student responses to Duckworth's Grit Survey, the Big Five Inventory (BFI) Personality Survey and summative attainment scores in a first year programming course. The results suggest a weak but significant correlation between conscientiousness, grit and programming achievement. We discuss these results as well as the limitations of the method used. Finally, we make some observations about the importance of these concepts in Computer Science education and outline further work in this area.

Citation

MCDERMOTT, R., DANIELS, M. and CAJANDER, A. 2015. Perserverance measures and attainment in first year computing science students. In Proceedings of the 2015 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Innovation and technology in computer science education conference (ITiCSE '15), 4-8 July 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania. New York: ACM [online], pages 302-307. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/2729094.2742625

• Conference Name: 2015 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Innovation and technology in computer science education conference (ITiCSE '15)
• Conference Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
• Start Date: Jul 4, 2015
• End Date: Jul 8, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Jan 11, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Jul 4, 2015
• Publication Date: Jun 22, 2015
• Deposit Date: Apr 6, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 6, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 302-307
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2729094.2742625
• Keywords: Perseverance; Grit; Conscientiousness; Personality traits; Programming
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/2262