Mühendislik Fakültesi Öğrencilerinin Programlamaya Yönelik Tutumları

During last decade, programming education has gained importance in a wide range from primary education to adult education. However, programming is not a new topic in engineering education compared to other disciplines and it has an important place in engineering education. It is critical to determine the attitudes towards programming, which is one of the important factors that affect the students' programming success in engineering faculties. However, it has not been researched enough. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate engineering students’ attitudes towards computer programming. In addition, it was examined whether students' attitudes towards programming differ according to gender, department and number of courses on programming. With this aim, a survey study which is a type of quantitative research methods was adopted, and 742 higher education students studying at the engineering faculty of a state university in Turkey were the sample of this study. The data were collected through the Attitude towards Computer Programming Scale. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation and non-parametric statistical tests. Using the descriptive statistics, it was found that engineering students had moderately high attitudes towards programming. Although students had middle level attitude at the cognitive dimension, they had moderately high attitudes at affective and behavioral dimensions. In addition, non-parametric tests indicated that although students' attitudes did not differ according to their gender, their attitudes differed according to their departments and the number of courses they took on programming. It could be concluded that Computer Engineering students’ attitudes towards programming were found to be higher than the students of the other engineering departments. Moreover, it was found the more courses on programming taken, the higher the attitude toward programming. In line with the results of this study, the number of programming language courses taken by engineering faculty students might be increased to improve their attitudes towards computer programming.