skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 8:00 PM ET on Friday, March 21 until 8:00 AM ET on Saturday, March 22 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


This content will become publicly available on July 11, 2025

Title: Examining the Role of Parental Support on Youth’s Interest in and Self-Efficacy of Computer Programming

Objectives. The increasing demand for computing skills has led to a rapid rise in the development of new computer science (CS) curricula, many with the goal of equitably broadening participation of underrepresented students in CS. While such initiatives are vital, factors outside of the school environment also play a role in influencing students’ interests. In this paper, we examined the effects of students’ perceived parental support on their interest in computer programming and explored the mechanisms through which this effect may have been established as students participated in an introductory CS instructional unit.

Participants. This instructional unit was implemented with upper primary (grade 5) school students and was designed to broaden trajectories for participation in CS. The participants in the current study (N=170) came from six classrooms in two rural schools in the western United States.

Study Method. The seven-week instructional unit began with students playing a commercial CS tabletop board game that highlighted fundamental programming concepts, and transitioned to having students create their own board game levels in the block-based programming language, Scratch. Further, because the board game could be taken home, the instructional unit offered opportunities to involve the family in school-based CS activities. To investigate the effect of students’ perception of parental (specifically father and mother) support on their interest in and self-efficacy to pursue CS, we surveyed students before and after the unit’s implementations and explored the structural relationship of the data using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results. We present three findings. First, the combined effect of students’ perceived mother’s and father’s support measured prior to the implementation (pre-survey) predicted students’ self-efficacy (Std B = 0.37, SE = 0.010, p < .001) and interest in computer programming (Std B = 0.328, SE = 0.134, p < .003) measured after the implementation (post-survey). Secondly, the combined effect of perceived mother and father support (Std B = 0.132, 95% CI [0.039, 0.399], 99% CI [0.017, 0.542]) on students’ interest was mediated by whether or not they took the CS board game home.

Conclusions. Our findings indicate that perceived parental support has the potential to play an important role in students’ self-efficacy and interest in computer programming and that providing opportunities for students to bring CS artifacts home has the potential to further affect students’ interest in computer programming.

 
more » « less
Award ID(s):
2031382
PAR ID:
10527750
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Computing Education
ISSN:
1946-6226
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Parental support is a predictor of children’s career interest and aspirations. However, mother and father support affects youth ca- reer choices differently. To understand how perceived mothers’ and fathers’ support affect career interest in computer science (CS), we developed two path models using both mother and father sup- port gains to predict youths’ interest in CS. We hypothesized that perceived father’s and mother’s support would relate to youths’ interest in CS via youths’ perception of CS utility value as a media- tor. We found that both mother and father support leads to interest in CS. However, father support was found to affect CS interest via the mediator utility-value beliefs. To provide explanations for these differences we used student interview data to explore how participants in our study perceived parental support. 
    more » « less
  2. Facility with foundational practices in computer science (CS) is increasingly recognized as critical for the 21st century workforce. Developing this capacity and broadening participation in CS disciplines will require learning experiences that can engage a larger and more diverse student population (Margolis et al., 2008). One promising approach involves including CS concepts and practices in required subjects like science. Yet, research on the scalability of educational innovations consistently demonstrates that their successful uptake in formal classrooms depends on teachers’ perceived alignment of the innovations with their goals and expectations for student learning, as well as with the specific needs of their school context and culture (Blumenfeld et al., 2000; Penuel et al., 2007; Bernstein et al., 2016). Research is nascent, however, about how exactly to achieve this alignment and thereby position integrated instructional models for uptake at scale. To contribute to this understanding, we are developing and studying two units for core middle school science classrooms, known as Coding Science Internships. The units are designed to support broader participation in CS, with a particular emphasis on females, by expanding students’ perception of the nature and value of coding. CS and science learning are integrated through a simulated internship model, in which students, as interns, apply science knowledge and use computer programming as a tool to address real-world problems. In one unit, students gain first-hand experience with sequences, loops, and conditionals as they program and debug an interactive scientific model of a coral reef ecosystem under threat. The second unit engages students in learning concepts related to data analysis and visualization, abstraction, and modularity as they code data visualizations using real EPA air quality data. A core goal for both units is to provide students experience with some of the increasingly prevalent ways that computer science is integrated into the work of scientists. 
    more » « less
  3. Gresalfi, Melissa ; Horn, Ilana Seidel (Ed.)
    This paper presents an instructional design using expansive framing to introduce computer programming to upper elementary students. By using a tabletop board game as the context for learning, bridging connections between the learning in the board game and its digital instantiation, and privileging student authorship, we show how two students developed and transferred their understanding of several computational practices, including procedures and conditional logic, from the board game into their design of digital games in Scratch. 
    more » « less
  4. Gresalfi, Melissa ; Horn, Ilana Seidel (Ed.)
    This paper presents an instructional design using expansive framing to introduce computer programming to upper elementary students. By using a tabletop board game as the context for learning, bridging connections between the learning in the board game and its digital instantiation, and privileging student authorship, we show how two students developed and transferred their understanding of several computational practices, including procedures and conditional logic, from the board game into their design of digital games in Scratch. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that was influenced by Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The purpose of this article, apart from promoting transparency of program design, was to evaluate the effectiveness of our camp design in terms of increasing youths’ interest, self-efficacy beliefs, and perceptions of parental support. We found significant gains for all three of these concepts. Additionally, we make connections between our design choices (e.g., videos, peer support, mentor support) and the affective gains by thematically analyzing interview data concerning the outcomes found in our camps. 
    more » « less