Can experts' explanations help students develop program design skills?

Abstract

This paper reports and experimental investigation of the effectiveness of case studies for teaching programming. A case study provides an “expert commentary” on the complex problem-solving skills used in constructing a solution to a computer programming problem as well as one or more worked-out solutions to the problem. To conduct the investigation, we created case studies of programming problems and evaluated what high school students in ten Pascal programming courses learned from them. We found that the expert's commentary on the decisions and activities required to solve a programming problem helped students gain integrated understanding of programming. Furthermore, the expert's commentary imparted more integrated understanding of programming than did the worked-out solution to the problem without the expert's explanation. These results support the contention that explicit explanations can help students learn complex problem-solving skills. We developed case studies for teaching students to solve programming problems for the same reasons that they have been developed in other disciplines. The case method for teaching complex problem solving was first used at Harvard College in 1870 and has permeated curricula for business, law and medicine across the country. These disciplines turned to the case method to communicate the complexity of real problems, to illustrate the process of dealing with this complexity and to teach analysis and decision making skills appropriate for these problems.