A study on students' behaviours and attitudes towards learning to program

Learning difficulties in introductory programming courses are well known to teachers and students. Although several types of causes for those difficulties can be pointed out, in this work we focused on student related issues, namely their study methods and attitudes towards learning to program. We found a strong correlation between students' results and their personal perceptions of competence during the course. This result raises the need for teachers to consider this issue when devising the pedagogical approaches to use in introductory programming courses.