"Sometimes You Just Gotta Risk It for the Biscuit": A Portrait of Student Risk-Taking

Abstract

Understanding how individuals make decisions involving risk is a fundamental aspect of behavioral research. Despite the ubiquity of risk in various aspects of life, limited empirical work has explored student risk-taking behavior in computing education. This study aims to partially replicate prior research on risk-taking behavior in software engineers while focusing on students, shedding light on the factors that affect their risk-taking choices. In our work, students were presented with a hypothetical scenario related to meeting a course project deadline, where they had to choose between a risky option and a safer alternative. We examined several factors that might influence these choices, including the framing of the decision (as a potential gain or loss), students' enjoyment of programming, perceived difficulty of programming, and their performance in the course. Our findings reveal intriguing insights into student risk-taking behavior. Similar to software engineers in prior work, the framing of the decision significantly impacted the choices students made, with the loss framing leading to a higher likelihood for risky choices. Surprisingly, students displayed a greater inclination towards risk-taking compared to their professional counterparts in prior research. Furthermore, we observed that students' performance in the course and their enjoyment of programming had a subtle correlation with their risk-taking tendencies, with better-performing students and those who enjoyed programming being marginally more prone to taking risks. Notably, we did not find statistically significant correlations between perceived difficulty of programming and risk-taking behavior among students.