What Influences Programming Ability: Skill Development or Natural Talent?

For undergraduate students in IT, proficiency in programming is regarded as one of the more difficult skills to acquire. Some students seem to understand the required logic effortlessly; for other students, no amount of practice seems to help. This paper assesses the circumstances that contribute to programming success in relation to one's deliberate acquisition of skills, (learned from practice), or one's perceived, innate ability; (from some form of understanding the logic required). In this study, and using a descriptive-correlational method, data is presented from 50 IT students, via structured surveys pertaining to, practice, self perceived ability, and confidence in the ability to code. It was found that most of the respondents, (64 percent), attributed practice as the key to success, while 36 percent thought that success came from a person's innate ability. In practice, a statistically significant positive correlation was found to exist between the hours of practice and the person's confidence to code, (r= 0.62, p < 0.01), while the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability), was found to be statistically significant, (r= 0.21, p > 0.05). These findings determine that the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability), is closer in relation to practice and self confidence, than to the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability). These results are used to demonstrate that the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability), is related to practice and self confidence more than it is to the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability). These results demonstrate that the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability), is more closely related to practice and self confidence than it is to the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability). These results demonstrate that the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability), is more closely related to practice and self confidence than the belief in one's ability as a coder, (innate ability). This study shows the need for a "nurture" approach rather than simply "natural born coder".