Differential cognitive support in teaching recursion

This study was designed to investigate the influence of instructional cognitive support on learning recursion and how instruction may interact with prior knowledge and spatial ability. An aptitude-treatment-interaction (ATI) research design was implemented to study the research problem. The compensation instruction which employed the copies model of recursion and the activation instruction which used the static copies model of recursion were implemented for this study. The compensation instruction provided a computer animated conceptual model as cognitive scaffolding to facilitate the construction of mental models of recursion and to compensate for inaptitude of the learners. The activation instruction provided the same conceptual model but in a static manner in the computer-based instruction. To assess learners' performance between treatment groups, two recursion achievement tests were administered. The immediate posttest was administered immediately after the treatment, and the delayed posttest was conducted two weeks after the treatment.;Compensation instruction was more effective than activation instruction in helping novice programmers (with low prior knowledge) to learn recursion. ATI was found between type of cognitive support and prior knowledge. Low prior knowledge students performed better in the compensation instruction than in the activation instruction, however, high prior knowledge students performed better in the activation instruction than in the compensation instruction. Due to the design of treatments which have diminished individual differences in spatial ability, spatial ability was not significantly related with learning recursion for the dynamic copies model group. Spatial ability, however, was found to be positively related with learning recursive programming for the static copies model group on the delayed posttest. The assertion of the dual-coding theory that students with high spatial ability and low prior knowledge are the most likely to benefit from the instruction that carefully synchronizes the presentation of verbal and visual forms of information was not evaluated in this study due to the distortion of analysis the interaction between two continuous variables.