Knowledge organization in novice student programmers: Relation to skill and instruction in programming classes

This study examined the knowledge organization of novice students programmers learning Pascal. Expert programmers have developed a repertoire of templates that include a representation of a program function and related knowledge of conditions for application. The objectives of the study were threefold: to determine (a) whether students can develop experts' templates, (b) how knowledge of templates affects programming skill, and (c) how can instructional practices foster learning of templates.;Forty two high school students in Pascal programming classes participated. Assessment focused on four aspects of template knowledge: (a) use of templates as categories for integrating information, (b) template robustness, (c) level of template representation, and (d) use of templates in planning a program. Each of these measures was related to programming skill, determined on the basis of students answers to two case studies and further decomposed into three subskills: Designing, Reformulating and Debugging. Instructional practices were evaluated from students' answers to a 82-item questionnaire and summarized in three main dimensions: Resources, Course Structure and Teaching Strategies.;The results indicate that students who learn to integrate their knowledge in templates have better designing and reformulating skills than students that organize their knowledge on the basis of the language syntax. Programming skill was associated with all four measures of template knowledge. More skilled students used templates as problem schemata, could generalize their templates to different problems, and showed formal representations of templates. Less skill students used the language features as problem schemata, could not generalize their templates and showed natural language representation of templates.;Instructional practices were also associated with template knowledge. The results suggest that students receiving explicit instruction and feedback are most likely to develop a template organization. The results also indicate that in order to use templates effectively in problem-solving, students need to be aware of their own learning processes and of experts' organization. Suggestions to increase awareness of templates and help students develop cohesive representations include taking advantage of several languages, teaching object-oriented programming and developing instructional material that emphasizes dynamic representation of templates.