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Exploring Differences in Planning between Students with and without Prior Experience in Programming

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

COED Programming Education 1: Students, Motivation, and Mastery

Tagged Division

Computers in Education Division (COED)

Page Count

20

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43601

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43601

Download Count

200

Paper Authors

biography

Ryan Parsons Western Washington University

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Ryan Parsons has taught introductory Computer Science for 6 years at Whatcom Community College. He served as the Program Coordinator for the newly created Software Development program there. He has been working on his Master's in Computer Science at Western Washington University, where his research focus has been on Computer Science Education.

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biography

Qiang Hao Western Washington University

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Associate professor of computer science

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biography

Lu Ding University of South Alabama

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Dr. Lu Ding researches critical aspects of teaching and learning in STEM fields such as student engagement and motivation in online learning environments. Currently, Lu's research involves how to design instructional videos for teaching debugging skills and misconceptions in learning programming. Another research line of hers is gaming and game-based learning (GBL), especially in empowering teachers to use GBL in their everyday teaching and to engage students in learning.

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Abstract

Planning, as a metacognitive skill, is critical to problem solving in computer science. Within the context of computer science, planning constitutes of understanding the problem by reading and exploring the prompt, breaking the problem down into smaller pieces such as listing methods and using pseudocode, and determining what tools are needed to solve the problem. Understanding the fine-grained differences between students with and without prior programming experience in terms of planning can help educators provide better guidance to novice learners in terms of how to approach problem-solving and design solutions given a programming task. Prior studies have contributed to understanding different aspects of problem solving in computing education, such as digesting errors, and debugging. However, few studies focused on the step of planning that happens mainly prior to problem solving. To fill this gap, we studied 48 students with and without prior programming experience in terms of planning prior to working on a programming assignment in the context of a second introductory programming course (CS2) via surveys and follow-up interviews. Our results shed light into the fine-grained differences in planning between novice and experienced learners. We discussed these differences and how they can be used to guide meaningful interventions that focus on megacognitive skills in computing education.

Parsons, R., & Hao, Q., & Ding, L. (2023, June), Exploring Differences in Planning between Students with and without Prior Experience in Programming Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43601

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