Affective Reporting: Improving Student Programming Self-assessments in CS0In-Person
CS1 students often think they are bad at programming, largely because they experience negative self-assessments as they program. In this study, I investigate whether students in CS0 contexts using a block-based language have similar self-assessment moments during programming, with the goal of finding ways to amplify positive self-assessments and ameliorate negative ones. Toward this end, I have designed an affective reporting tool and a study to understand the programming moments that lead to positive or negative student affect for CS0 students. The affective reporting tool was piloted in a CS0 course. Fifty-three out of seventy-one students voluntarily used the tool, reporting 191 affective states within the first hour. This willingness to share their affective data through the new tool shows that students may need such outlets to reflect on and share how they are feeling while programming. The tool will also be used in a study where students will program using the affective reporter, then reflect on and review a video of their programming to tell us more about how they felt while programming and suggest interventions that could help. The results of these studies will be used to design a detector and interventions to help students and improve their programming self-assessments.