Byckling P. (2006)
Effects of Roles of Variables in Learning to Program: Results of a Classroom Experiment
Licenciate Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Joensuu, Finland.
Abstract: Programming is a skill that is hard to acquire. Program language knowledge, i.e., knowledge of syntactic and semantic features of a programming language is alone insufficient in constructing programs --- higher level programming knowledge (more general plans and design structures) is needed. Expert programmers possess hierarchically organized tacit programming knowledge and strategies which provide them better problem solving capacity than what novices have.
Teaching programming has traditionally concentrated only on syntactic and semantic features whereas explicit teaching of higher level programming knowledge has been very rare. The concept of Roles of Variables represent high level programming knowledge explicitly by capturing the behavior of variables. This thesis reports the results of program comprehension and program construction protocol tasks conducted along with a classroom experiment where roles were used in teaching for the first time in introductory programming course.
The purpose of the analyses reported in this thesis was to reveal differences in high-level programming knowledge between experimental groups taught differently. In this kind of examination where humans knowledge structures and cognitive processing are studied with empirical experiments the methodology of analyses should be thought out well. Thus, this thesis concentrates also on the methodology of studying high level programming knowledge by providing an inter-rater investigation of Good's program summary analysis scheme and introducing a new analysis method for analyzing the use of role plans in program construction.
The results of the analysis suggest that the use of roles of variables in teaching facilitates program construction skills considerably. In program comprehension the effect was percaivable but smaller.
Last updated: June 8, 2006