Measuring learners’ interest in computing (education): Development of an instrument and first results

Abstract

So far, there is hardly any empirical research on the question of what raises or influences the interest of school learners in computer science or computing education. Aspects to be considered are for example pedagogical decisions of the teacher concerning contexts, phenomena, situations, or concepts to which a lesson or a lesson sequence refers, planned learner activities and many others. This paper analyses a model for describing interest in physics on its transferability to computer science, reports about the development of an online questionnaire for investigating the computing-related interests of school learners and gives results of a first empirical pilot study (based on N = 141 datasets). Based on the participants’ answers concerning socio-demographical aspects, the computing interest of different groups of learners was analyzed. A higher level of computing interest was found at male pupils, learners who indicated that they were striving for a computing-related job, that computing was their favorite school subject, or that they had good or very good school marks in mathematics or computing.