A Study on the Factors Affecting Academic Achievement in the Non-Face-to-Face Class Environment Due to COVID-19: Focusing on Computer Liberal Arts Education Class

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

As the authors point out, the effects of COVID-19 have affected education, especially in the loss of attendance.
Non-attendance in practical subjects, such as programming, on which the study is focused, non-attendance classes have a series of limitations. How this fact affects the moods and psychological activities of students is a subject of maximum interest. And the approach of collecting data in online classrooms to academic success is a valid strategy.
For this reason, I consider that the topic is of great interest and can provide more information on this problem.

 The theoretical framework is robust and well constructed. The methodology, results and discussion are sufficiently developed and applied.

The methodological approach followed in the study is consistent and robust, although it could have been enriched with qualitative information, pure data mining may be sufficient.

In this sense, the article joins a series of studies that are being carried out not only from the point of view of COVID but also from online teaching as a distance training strategy.

The article is well structured and correctly written.

The results, discussion and conclusions are perfectly linked and are consistent with the evidence provided by the data.
In this sense, I congratulate the authors for their work.

 

Author Response

We have made an academic effort to advance the basic education of computer programming. In the preparation of this study, we prepared to improve the experience of SW education academically and to find an effective programming education method.

Thank you for recognizing the efforts of the authors for their research.

And the qualitative research mentioned by the reviewer will be conducted using the methodology of this study for students who are not majoring in software.

Reviewer 2 Report

The title of this paper, "A Research on the Factors Affecting Academic Achievement in the Non-Face-to-Face Class Environment due to COVID-19: Focusing on Computer Liberal Arts Education Class", perfectly explains its central issues. They are important, since the recent health emergency forced us to find new methodologies for learning. It is particularly true for those subjects, such as programming, which benefit from lab activities and interaction with teachers/tutors. 

On the whole, I think that it is a good paper: it is clearly written, the methodology is adequate and well explained, findings are solid. However, there are a few aspects that could be improved before acceptance.

Firstly, the context of the research is liberal art classes, which is interesting because their students usually do not have a strong scientific background that would help them with programming. However, this aspect is not considered in the discussion of the results. Do the authors think that it affects the results? Would the results be different if students had a stronger scientific background? I would expect to find answers to these questions in the conclusion. 

Moreover, I would expect to read more studies related to computer programming in the theoretical background. I also think that this section should include a discussion on the factors object of investigation in the present study (such as attendance, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, confidence, frequency of communication in mobile chat rooms, Python programming intention). 

In the end, there are a few sentences that I suggest to check: 

• line 108
• lines 348-349
• lines 433-436
• line 453.

 

 

Author Response

Reviewer 2

The title of this paper, "A Research on the Factors Affecting Academic Achievement in the Non-Face-to-Face Class Environment due to COVID-19: Focusing on Computer Liberal Arts Education Class", perfectly explains its central issues. They are important, since the recent health emergency forced us to find new methodologies for learning. It is particularly true for those subjects, such as programming, which benefit from lab activities and interaction with teachers/tutors.

On the whole, I think that it is a good paper: it is clearly written, the methodology is adequate and well explained, findings are solid. However, there are a few aspects that could be improved before acceptance.

Firstly, the context of the research is liberal art classes, which is interesting because their students usually do not have a strong scientific background that would help them with programming. However, this aspect is not considered in the discussion of the results. Do the authors think that it affects the results? Would the results be different if students had a stronger scientific background? I would expect to find answers to these questions in the conclusion.

Your expertise in this field and profound understanding of this research pointed out significant points. Computational thinking (CT) is a scientific background related to programming education that is studied as a key factor in student competency. As the reviewer commented, the authors analyzed students' interest in SW programming classes without sufficient scientific background. The contents of related previous studies were newly added in Chapter 2, Section 2.2.

The authors identified methodological improvements for follow-up studies in previous studies on the relationship between CT and academic achievement. In this study, computational thinking was not treated as an analytical factor in data modeling. The authors plan to conduct a follow-up study on this factor in the future, and in conclusion, write this as a limitation of this study.

 

Moreover, I would expect to read more studies related to computer programming in the theoretical background. I also think that this section should include a discussion on the factors object of investigation in the present study (such as attendance, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, confidence, frequency of communication in mobile chat rooms, Python programming intention).

Based on reviewer comments, the authors proofread the entire contents of this research paper. In the process, previous studies related to computer programming, attendance, effort expectation, pleasure motivation, confidence, communication frequency in mobile chat rooms, and Python programming intent were added to this study. These additional sentences were additionally written in sections 2.2 and 2.3.

In the end, there are a few sentences that I suggest to check:

 

line 108

lines 348-349

lines 433-436

line 453.

As a result of your thoughtful comment, we checked those all sentences again and revised them.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf