There is a growing need for upper- and lower-secondary education institutions to provide computer science (CS) knowledge and skills to learners. As learners’ motivation plays an important role in their learning and female students have shown to be less motivated to study CS, the current study focuses on developing a scale for measuring lower- and upper-secondary students’ motivation to study CS and investigating the motivation of female and male students.

Data was collected from 740 Estonian students from 9th and 12th grade (55.1% female) by online questionnaire, which was based on value-expectancy theory. Nine factors of student’s motivation to study CS were differentiated by Confirmatory Factor Analysis: value of future work, importance, altruistic motivation, positive learning experiences from school, self-efficacy, positive learning experiences, social pressure, perceived abilities, interest. Multivariate analyses of variance with the Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons revealed that the factor ‘value of future work’ was the highest and factor ‘interest’ was ranked the lowest among motivational factors. Multivariate test between-subjects’ effects with Bonferroni adjustment indicated that in all of these factors, boys showed higher motivation to study CS than girls.

The results are valuable for teachers who teach CS in school. When planning CS lessons, the teachers should consider the type of motivation that drives the students and put more effort on motivating the girls as the boys are generally more motivated to study CS. E.g., the teacher can raise students’ interest towards CS by bringing in real life CS problems and linking the tasks with possible future work, encouraging girls to participate in CS competition and giving them more recognition to increase girls’ self-efficacy and interest, which were more highly rated by boys than girls.