A “Metacourse” for Basic: Assessing a New Model for Enhancing Instruction

Abstract

In response to a number of difficulties many beginners exhibit in trying to master a programming language such as BASIC or LOGO, a “metacourse” was developed to be integrated into a teacher's normal course materials as an enriching “vitamin shot.” The metacourse in BASIC consists of mental models, problem-solving strategies, key concepts, and other structures that may help students to understand more deeply and wield more artfully the knowledge they are acquiring during their regular instruction in BASIC. Highly encouraging results, in terms of increased mastery of BASIC, were found in two large scale empirical studies conducted in a number of high school BASIC programming classes. Metacourse classes exhibited improved performance on a variety of BASIC programming tasks, ranging from comprehension of simple commands to debugging and production of small programs. This same pattern was observed with interventions which offered teachers considerable support (Study 1), or the minimal support more typical of “normal” classroom conditions (Study 2).

Failure Artifact Scenarios to Understand High School Students' Growth in Troubleshooting Physical Computing Projects

“…For instance, Carver and Klahr [3] provided students with buggy Logo programs, and asked them to identify and solve code problems. Schwartz, and colleagues [32] followed with the development of what they called a "Metacourse" in which they trained and asked students to identify and then fix different types of bugs in given Basic programs. Harel [13] and Kafai [17] also provided students with buggy Logo programs to fix, both on paper and on the computer.…”

An investigation of the relationship between student algorithm quality and program quality

“…Schwartz et al (1989) and Kurland et al (1986) found that after months and sometimes even years of programming instruction, many students still display misconceptions in their conceptual knowledge and exhibit poor programming skills. Linn and Clancy (1992) have argued that most int, oductory programming courses foster the development of syntactic knowledge and do not put enough emphasis on the development of conceptual knowledge and program design skills which students are assumed to acquire on their own.…”

Implementing process-based instruction in regular university teaching: Conceptual, methodological and practical issues

“…, de Corte et a!., (1992) have argued that most introductory programming courses foster the development of syntactic knowledge and do not put enough emphasis on the development of conceptual knowledge, nor strategic knowledge which is left to unguided discovery. Schwartz et al, (1989) and Kurland et aI., (1986) found that after months and sometimes even years of programming instruction, many students still display misconceptions in their conceptual knowledge and exhibit poor programming skills. Recent experimental studies (Bayman & Mayer, 1988;Bielaczyc & Brown, 1994;Schwartz et al, 1989) addressed successfully the conceptual and strategic deficiencies in students' knowledge.…”

“…Schwartz et al, (1989) and Kurland et aI., (1986) found that after months and sometimes even years of programming instruction, many students still display misconceptions in their conceptual knowledge and exhibit poor programming skills. Recent experimental studies (Bayman & Mayer, 1988;Bielaczyc & Brown, 1994;Schwartz et al, 1989) addressed successfully the conceptual and strategic deficiencies in students' knowledge. Students' development of effective programming skills was enhanced by enriching standard teaching materials with supplements that emphasised the underlying semantics of programming (Bayman & Mayer, 1988), by providing complete descriptions of the problem-solving steps used by the experts by fostering the development of an appropriate mental model of the operations of the computer (Schwartz et a!., 1989) or by fostering students' collaborative explanations (Bielaczyc, Brown, & Pirolli, 1994).…”