Students' metacognitive processes and impact on Self-efficacy in embedded programming

For minimizing students drop out on 2^nd semester, Electrical Engineering (EE) BEng we experiment with a written and video process guideline for support of solving programming problems and metacognitive awareness. We will try to measure how students emotional experience programming by using a special self-assessment vignette inquiry. On 1^st semester, we will measure when programming as novices in two study lines (EE - and IT-Electronic BEng students (IE)) and do a comparison with 2^nd semester for EE students. On 2^nd we introduce a process for program development in Digital electronics and programming (DEP) and we will measure 3 times during the semester the effect of the process by using self assessment vignette inquiry. The working hypothesis is: Can the emotional experiences become lower, then the self-efficacy will be higher and the drop out will be lower. The articles describes the theoretical background for both the process and the students’ self-assessment resulting in emotional experiences. The results so far are that on 1^st semester IE there is only 20% of students, which has a total score greater that 40 (total score max 78) whereas among the 2^nd semester EE students 33% students has a score above 40. High score means great emotional impact.