TY - GEN
T1 - Can distributed practice improve students' efficacy in learning their first programming language?
AU - Zhang, Qiujie
AU - Zhang, Lishan
AU - Li, Baoping
AU - Chen, Ling
AU - Hsiao, Ihan
AU - Wu, Fati
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by The Chinese Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science Foundation under projects number 14YJC880025, and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under projects number 2017M610054.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Learning how to program has become required for many majors in higher education. However, programming is not easily learned, especially for non-engineering students. To improve students' learning efficiency, we applied distributed practice to a C programming class with 69 college students in first grade, but have students decide the space of practice by themselves. By mining the relationships between practice patterns and learning performance, we found that students who practiced with high frequency significantly outperformed those who practiced infrequently. The frequency of practice was a strong predictor of both homework grades (p=0.001) and midterm exam grades (p=0.023). By contrast, the total amount of practice had very little effect on learning performance. The result shows that distributed practice is a better learning strategy than massed practice in C programming language learning. But the optimized space of practice in this domain has not been completely revealed yet.
AB - Learning how to program has become required for many majors in higher education. However, programming is not easily learned, especially for non-engineering students. To improve students' learning efficiency, we applied distributed practice to a C programming class with 69 college students in first grade, but have students decide the space of practice by themselves. By mining the relationships between practice patterns and learning performance, we found that students who practiced with high frequency significantly outperformed those who practiced infrequently. The frequency of practice was a strong predictor of both homework grades (p=0.001) and midterm exam grades (p=0.023). By contrast, the total amount of practice had very little effect on learning performance. The result shows that distributed practice is a better learning strategy than massed practice in C programming language learning. But the optimized space of practice in this domain has not been completely revealed yet.
KW - Distributed practice
KW - Higher education
KW - Massed practice
KW - Programming language learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85053905838&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85053905838&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85053905838
SN - 9789869401265
T3 - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2017 - Main Conference Proceedings
SP - 427
EP - 432
BT - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2017 - Main Conference Proceedings
A2 - Mohd Ayub, Ahmad Fauzi
A2 - Mitrovic, Antonija
A2 - Yang, Jie-Chi
A2 - Wong, Su Luan
A2 - Chen, Wenli
PB - Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education
T2 - 25th International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2017
Y2 - 4 December 2017 through 8 December 2017
ER -