A Study of the Relationship between a CS1 Student's Gender and Performance Versus Gauging Understanding and Study Tactics
Metacognitive monitoring is an individual's ability to assess their level of mastery. This skill is integral to learning because students decide what to study based on what they believe they do not understand. Therefore, how well can a CS1 student gauge their mastery? We had students demonstrate their metacognitive monitoring skills by predicting their scores for all three exams of a 15-week CS1 course. We collected data from two course offerings. Moreover, we had students predict both before and after each exam to understand the effect of seeing it and surveyed students on how they studied. We found that our study's students were reasonably accurate, but low performers were worse than high performers. However, high performers did not improve between their before and after predictions. We did not have sufficient evidence that students improve their predictions over time. Prediction accuracy did not have a gender effect. Finally, we found no difference in study tactics by gender and little difference between high and low performers. Overall, we found only some similarities to related work.
