Does a Distributed Practice Strategy for Multiple Choice Questions Help Novices Learn Programming?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v15i18.10567Keywords:
distributed practice, massed practice, programming language learning, multiple choice question, data analysisAbstract
Learning how to program is becoming essential in many disciplines. However, programming cannot be easily learned, especially by non-engineering students. It is challenging to conduct engineering education for non-engineering majored students. Therefore, it is important to teach non-engineering students to learn with efficient learning strategies. To discover an efficient learning strategy, we had 64 students practice programming with a simple learning management system and tracked all of their practice behaviors on multiple choice questions. The learning management system assigned one multiple choice question per day, but let students themselves decide their own practice frequencies. Students could also make unsynchronized communications by commenting on the questions. By analyzing their behavior patterns and other performance indicators, this paper compared the effect of two different practice strategies for multiple choice questions: distributed practice and massed practice. Our analysis found that students who adopted distributed practice significantly outperformed those who adopted massed practice on final exams (p=0.031). We further explored the possible reasons that led to this significant difference. Students who adopted distributed practice strategy tended to make higher percentage of first submission correctness, be more cautious while correcting errors, and be more constructive in posting question-related comments.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The submitting author warrants that the submission is original and that she/he is the author of the submission together with the named co-authors; to the extend the submission incorporates text passages, figures, data or other material from the work of others, the submitting author has obtained any necessary permission.
Articles in this journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY What does this mean?). This is to get more legal certainty about what readers can do with published articles, and thus a wider dissemination and archiving, which in turn makes publishing with this journal more valuable for you, the authors.
By submitting an article the author grants to this journal the non-exclusive right to publish it. The author retains the copyright and the publishing rights for his article without any restrictions.