Effectiveness of paradigmatic approach in teaching programming

Abstract

A paradigmatic approach in teaching FORTRAN programming language has been successfully implemented in the past.The present paper summarizes the results of a pilot experiment conducted to verify the effectiveness of this approach among students.About seventy-five engineering students who took a course in FORTRAN using a paradigmatic approach were instructed to construct problems from their areas of specialization.The constructed problems were compared to the paradigms they had used and a similarity measure was introduced.The results were compared with a control group of the same number of students with the same background who had taken a standard FORTRAN class.A preliminary investigation shows that students who had been exposed to a paradigmatic approach were more successful in providing parallel problems from their areas of specialization than the students who used conventional methods.The implications and further studies needed are outlined at the end of the paper.Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.