Self-efficacy, Interest, and Belongingness - URM Students' Momentary Experiences in CS1

Educational stakeholders want to understand and overcome the well-documented racial and gender disparities within computer science education. There are many factors that influence students' participation, performance, and persistence in CS courses, including motivational and affective factors. Prior research in CS education has documented the influence of these factors on students' CS outcomes generally, and on URM students in particular. What has been less investigated, is how students' motivational and affective experiences in CS develop and evolve from moment to moment, particularly for URM students. To better understand how these experiences develop, this paper presents the results of a study using intensive longitudinal methods which examined the differences in momentary experiences between racially underrepresented students and their represented peers in undergraduate introductory computer science courses. Using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), we solicited responses on students' momentary self-efficacy, interest, and affective experiences 8-18 times in each of two semesters from a total of 110 CS students, of which 19 identified as racially underrepresented. Analyzing the data using a Bayesian multivariate multilevel modeling approach, we found that students' pre-semester self-efficacy impacted their momentary frustration, interest, and self-efficacy throughout the duration of the semester, as expected. Likewise, students' baseline interest significantly impacted their momentary self-efficacy and interest. Baseline sense of belonging, by contrast, showed no significant impact on their momentary experiences. We also examined how students' affective experiences relate to course outcomes and found that baseline self-efficacy significantly predicts end-of-course grades for URM students. Overall, this study highlights that students' self-efficacy and interest are important for their momentary experiences, and course outcomes for URM students, while their sense of belonging did not make a significant impact. We expected that these influences might differ in magnitude for URM students, although a larger sample size and greater statistical power is needed to substantiate this possibility. Nevertheless, the findings from this study emphasize the importance of self-efficacy, and interest for URM students' momentary experiences, which are important for their other outcomes in CS classes.