摘要：This study aims to explore and reveal profiling patterns in the measurement of cognitive and noncognitivecharacteristics of undergraduate students’ programming performances. Spatial skills, workingmemory, perceived programming self-efficacy, mathematics scores, and academic grade point averagescores were taken indicative variables to be explored. Participants of the study are 100 undergraduatestudents registered to the Programming-I course at two different universities. The data were analyzedthrough multi-dimensional profile analysis. The result of the multidimensional scaling analysis indicated twodifferent profiles for the two groups: high and low programming performance groups. For both groups,relationship between the most similar variables was found to be verbal memory, mathematics achievementand perceived programming self-efficacy. The results indicated that there was a relatively similarrelationship between visual-spatial memory and spatial orientation skills in the low-performance group,while mental rotation skill was significantly different than the other variables. It was noted that two profiles forhigh- and low-performance groups were quite different in terms of mental rotation skill. It was also found that spatial orientation, visual-spatial memory and mental rotation performances were all different from eachother, and from the other three variables in the group with high programming performance. The mostdefinitive variables for low- and high-performance groups were self-efficacy, verbal memory andmathematics achievement. This study revealed that only verbal memory was the determinant variable inboth groups for working memory.
