Student strategies for learning programming from a computational environment

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of a hypertext-based environment that presents instructional material on programming in Lisp. The design of the environment was motivated by results from studies investigating students’ strategies for knowledge acquisition. The effectiveness of the design was evaluated by conducting a study that contrasted how subjects used and learned from the instructional environment compared to subjects using more standard, structured, linear instruction. The results showed an interesting ability by environment interaction: the higher ability subjects using the hypertext environment improved and made significantly less errors when programming new concepts while the lower ability subjects did not improve and made more errors. Meanwhile, subjects using the control environment did not show this ability-based difference. These results have implications for the design of intelligent tutoring systems. They affect decisions involving the amount of learner control that is provided to students and the way student models are constructed.