Enhancing Students' Computer Programming Performances, Critical Thinking Awareness and Attitudes towards Programming: An Online Peer-Assessment Attempt

It has become an important and challenging issue to foster students' concepts and skills of computer programming. Scholars believe that programming training could promote students' higher order thinking performance; however, many school teachers have reported the difficulty of teaching pro...

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Published in:Educational Technology ＆ Society Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 58 - 68
Main Authors: Wang, Xiao-Ming, Hwang, Gwo-Jen, Liang, Zi-Yun, Wang, Hsiu-Ying
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Palmerston North International Forum of Educational Technology ＆ Society 01.10.2017
National Sun Yat-Sen University
International Forum of Educational Technology & Society
Subjects:
Analysis
Attitude (Psychology)
Attitudes
CAI
Computer assisted instruction
Computer programming
Computer science education
Computers
Control Groups
Critical Thinking
Distance learning
Educational activities
Educational Strategies
Electronic Learning
Experimental Groups
Foreign Countries
Full Length Articles
Grade 9
Junior High School Students
Junior High Schools
Learning
Learning Activities
On-line systems
Online learning
Peer Evaluation
Peers
Pretests
Pretests Posttests
Programming
Programming languages
Quasiexperimental Design
Skills
Statistical Analysis
Student Attitudes
Students
Study and teaching
Teachers
Teaching Methods
Thinking Skills
User interfaces
Taiwan
Peer assessment
Computer programming
Learning attitude
Scratch
Critical thinking
ISSN:1176-3647, 1436-4522, 1436-4522
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:It has become an important and challenging issue to foster students' concepts and skills of computer programming. Scholars believe that programming training could promote students' higher order thinking performance; however, many school teachers have reported the difficulty of teaching programming courses. Although several previous studies have attempted to develop friendly user interfaces to ease students' loads, teaching programming courses remains a big challenge for most school teachers. In this study, an online peer assessment-based system was developed to cope with this problem. The students could use the peer-assessment function to provide comments to peers, and review the feedback and scores from peers during the learning activity. A quasi experiment was conducted on four classes of 166 ninth graders of a junior high school located in southern Taiwan to examine the impacts of the developed system. Two classes of students were assigned to the experimental group, learning with an online peer assessment-based teaching strategy, while the other two classes were the control group, learning with the conventional teaching strategy. The experimental results showed that the students in the experimental group had better programming knowledge and skills as well as more positive learning attitudes and critical thinking awareness than those in the control group, revealing the benefits of the proposed approach.
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ISSN:1176-3647
1436-4522
1436-4522