Student Motivations and Goals for CS1: Themes and Variations

ABSTRACTStudents come to CS1 with a wide variety of motivations and goals, which may differ across subpopulations and be indicative of their future engagement with CS. While there is a rich literature relating success in CS1 to specific constructs, such as belonging, goal-orientation, or self-efficacy, less work has examined what motivations and goals students volunteer as most important for their enrollment in CS1. Here, we use qualitative coding to identify themes from students' open-ended descriptions of why they're taking CS1 and what they hope to get out of it, collected across fifteen years. Using quantitative analysis of these coded descriptions, and word-frequency analysis, we identify and name three clusters of students that encompass the majority of students taking CS1: Explorers, Planners, and Utilitarians. We also identify motivations and goals that are more common for particular populations, such as students who have not yet declared a major or students without prior programming experience, as well as factors predicting students' later engagement with CS. This work demonstrates the potential of qualitative coding and computational analyses to enable us to better understand a population of students based on their own words.