Within the context of computing education, we refer to outcome expectancy as students’ self-estimated performance in a learning environment. We believe this construct has the potential to serve as a proxy for a broad range of motivational constructs capable of influencing students’ engagement and persistence in a course. While substantial prior research has delved into other motivational factors like students’ self-efficacy, there remains a need for further exploration into the nuances of students’ intrinsic belief constructs in relation to their learning behavior, engagement, and performance. This paper studies the impact of factors like GPA, self-efficacy, and other identified constructs on students’ outcome expectancy. We also study the group-based differences in students’ performance based on outcome expectancy.

For this purpose, we analyzed the data of four hundred and ten engineering students enrolled in an introductory programming course (CS1). An exploratory factor analysis of surveyed questions was performed, identifying factors linked to students’ self-efficacy, attitude toward learning, and perceptions about programming. We found that students’ outcome expectancy significantly differed based on each of these identified factors and GPA. Furthermore, we also found that students’ performance in the course significantly differed based on their outcome expectancy. We believe that such an analysis will provide CS educators with a better grounding to understand the underlying belief constructs that influence students’ participation, persistence, and performance.