USING A HYBRID APPROACH TO FACILITATE LEARNING INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMMING

ABSTRACT

In order to facilitate students’ understanding in introductory programming courses, different types of teaching approaches were conducted. In this study, a hybrid approach including comment first coding (CFC), analogy and template approaches were used. The goal was to investigate the effect of such a hybrid approach on students’ understanding in introductory programming A quasi-experimental design and one control group (CG, N =38) and one experimental group (EG, N = 38) were used. While the control group was taught in the traditional way, the experimental group received another instructional package which included the hybrid approach. Three open ended questions were administered as a pretest and a Programming Knowledge Test (ProKT) was administered as a posttest. The Posttest results were examined in two domains (conceptual understanding and problem solving). In addition, the observations made in the EG classroom were interpreted as qualitative data. While there was no statistically significant difference between two groups in the pretest scores, EG students performed better than the CG students in problem solving domain of posttest. Observations and posttest results showed that the EG students were better in remediating the deficiencies especially in problem solving, in addition to basic programming concepts and language features. Based on these results; it was concluded that integrating three different approaches together has positive effects on facilitating students’ development of introductory programming knowledge.