The Fear Factor: How It Affects Students Learning to Program in a Tertiary Environment

Abstract

This paper examines how students’ experiences of le arning to program are affected by feelings of fear, using a phenomenological approach to elicit rich descriptions of personal experiences from the narratives of final year undergraduate students. In the course of reviewing current work concerning learning or teaching programming, certain focal areas of research emerged. This paper a ttempted to group these into three main topics. These are the predictors of student success in learning programming, the barriers to learning pro- gramming. and the teaching tools or learning methodologies which could assist with learning programming. The review was conducted with pa rticular emphasis on phenomenological research in this field. Cockburn’s concepts of skills ac quisition and Dreyfus’ levels of adult learning are discussed and are used as a theoretical lens to examine the growth of the students. Learning to program or code forms part of th e core courses taught by the Information Systems (IS) department at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Assuming one of the goals of education is to prepare students for the working world, a strong practical component is required. Although programming skills are less central to the IS curriculum than to that of computer science, a num- ber of IS graduates become business analysts or project managers and are required to communi- cate with team members and, at the very least , to have a good understanding of programming is- sues. To address this need, the IS department at UCT designed a curriculum that introduces stu- dents to problem-solving, coding, and testing issues through an action learning cycle and that culminates in third year by requiring students to initialize an IS project from conception to readi- ness to implement. It is from this background th at the students for this study were selected. This paper approached the research from an inte rpretative stance, and, as the main aim was to describe students’ life experiences and discove r the essence and meaning of programming from their perspective, a phenomenological methodology appeared to be ideally suited. From the analysis, six themes were uncovered. These themes are the apprehension or fear associ- ated with programming, the resulting negative pe rceptions, the nature of programming that gives rise to these feelings, the internal factors influencing these feelings, the external factors influenc- ing these feelings, and finally how these feelings have affected the students’ growth or skills acquisition. A model is proposed that illustrates the relationship between the six themes, guides the analysis, and helps to makes sense of the implications. This paper offers an insight into the dif- ficulties experienced by students learn- ing to program, and should be of interest to educationalists, particularly those in the programming environment, who seek to understand the problems faced by students in order to prov ide more effective support through their teaching approach and student interactions.