Exploring the Impact of Worked Examples in a Novice Programming Environment
By Rui Zhi, Thomas William Price, Samiha Marwan, Alexandra Milliken, Tiffany Barnes, Min Chi. 2019
52 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Research in a variety of domains has shown that viewing worked examples (WEs) can be a more efficient way to learn than solving equivalent problems. We designed a Peer Code Helper system to display WEs, along with scaffolded self-explanation prompts, in a block-based, novice programming environment called \snap. We evaluated our system during a high school summer camp with 22 students. Participants completed three programming problems with access to WEs on either the first or second problem. We found that WEs did not significantly impact students' learning, but may have impacted students' intrinsic cognitive load, suggesting that our WEs with scaffolded prompts may be an inherently different learning task. Our results show that WEs saved students time on initial tasks compared to writing code, but some of the time saved was lost in subsequent programming tasks. Overall, students with WEs completed more tasks within a fixed time period, but not significantly more. WEs may improve students' learning efficiency when programming, but these effects are nuanced and merit further study.
Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Computer Science Applications
- Paul Denny
- Juho Leinonen
- Sami Sarsa
- Arto Hellas
- Stephen MacNeil
- Seth Bernstein
- Andrew Tran
- Joanne Kim
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Human-Computer Interaction
- Sami Sarsa
- Juho Leinonen
- Arto Hellas
- Paul Denny
- Seth Bernstein
- Andrew Tran
- Stephen MacNeil
- Joanne Kim
Citations in the corpus
- Comparing Code Explanations Created by Students and Large Language Models (2023, background): “Learning by example is an effective pedagogical technique, often employed in programming education [2, 48].”
- Step Tutor: Supporting Students through Step-by-Step Example-Based Feedback (2020, background): “Peer Code Helper offers such step-bystep WEs from the same task, during block-based programming [53].”