Introduction of process in embedded programming supporting students’ self-efficacy - case study

This work is directed towards the improvement of programming skills for students on the 2nd semester of Electrical Engineering (EE) BEng signed up for the “Digital Electronics and Programming” (DEP) course. The goal is to support students who tend to drop out in the first half of the semester or give up and not show up at oral exams. In our research hypothesis we state: Decreasing and eliminating negative emotional experiences will increase student’s self-efficacy thereby lowering dropout. We experiment with a programming process guide in text and video to gain students' capability in solving programming problems and increase metacognitive awareness. Additionally, we measure students' emotional experience of programming by using a special self-assessment vignette inquiry. For comparison purposes we introduced the same measurement methodology in 2021 on the courses where there is no focus on the process guideline. The results show a positive effect on lowering the negative emotional impact when students use a programming process guide. The article describes the theoretical background based on literature studies for both the process and the students’ self-assessment, and discusses results achieved in relation to the findings in the literature. The preliminary results are described in [8] and in paper here we present recent outcomes for the autumn 2021 and spring 2022 semester over 9 weeks.