An Investigation of Self-Regulatory Mechanisms in Learning to Program Visual Basic

Today, information technology (IT) has permeated virtually every aspect of our society and the learning of software programming is becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of the IT infrastructure critical to our daily life. In this article, we report the results of a study that demonstrates how the self-regulation paradigm may contribute to research learning in programming. A laboratory study of college students learning to program Visual Basic is conducted in this pursuit. Our study shows that both goal setting and self-efficacy in learning to program serve to positively influence the learning performance anticipatorily while self-satisfaction serves as a feedback for learners to evaluate their performance. A high level of goal commitment and self-efficacy in learning to program leads to successful learning, which in turn generates a high-level of satisfaction that further heightens students' sense of commitment to learning. Conversely, when students lack self-efficacy and goal commitment, their learning dwindles and becomes unsatisfied.