Meta-analysis to study the impact of learning engagement strategies in introductory computer programming courses

Abstract

Various Learning Engagement Strategies (LESs) have been used in CS education to motivate students and facilitate learning. More recently, LESs are being used to support programming pedagogy. Therefore, investigating the influence that the multiple attributes of LESs used as instruction interventions have on students' academic performance is a fertile educational research area. For the past few years, a group of CSEd researchers across three different U.S. institutions have been using a cyberlearning environment (incorporating LESs) to promote student learning and engagement in introductory programming courses. While there have been researches on independent studies on particular LES, the current paper is a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of various combinations of Learning Engagement Strategies (LESs) across different student groups using a series of studies conducted across these three separate institutions over a period of time. Specifically, we investigate the impact of different combinations of LESs such as collaborative learning (CL), gamification (G), and social interaction (SI) embedded in a cyberlearning environment on student understanding of programming concepts in an introductory programming course. In terms of findings that can be generalized across institutions and students, we found that using LESs had a positive impact on student engagement and learning especially when using SI and G in combination.