Towards an instructional design of complex learning in introductory programming courses

Abstract

To provide effective learning strategies to complex content, educational psychology produced frameworks that holistically integrate skills at a controlled pace achieved by sequencing tasks by its complexity. However, to apply such frameworks to introductory programming courses, there is a dearth of established methodologies for assessing how difficult such tasks are from the student's cognitive perspective. My goals are twofold: in order to design an instructional intervention that applies and adapt frameworks aimed to complex learning, I first establish and empirically validate a model to evaluate the complexity of programs from a cognitive perspective, providing metrics to quantify different aspects of program's complexity. I want to explore how to refine and expand this model analysis, what kind of evidence can be extracted from its empirical validation and how to impact instructional design with the results of my work.