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Title: Learning to program: A phenomenographic perspective (Göteborg studies in educational sciences) by Shirley Booth ISBN: 9-1734625-6-X Publisher: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Unknown Binding

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Summary: Well, it's my doctoral thesis, so... Here is the abstract:
Comment: Learning to program was studied by following a group of undergraduate students of Computer Science while on their introductory course in programming, in a functional programming language, Standard Meta-Language (SML). The central question addressed was, What does it mean and what does it take to learn to program? The study was conducted in the phenomenographic tradition, seeking qualitatively distinct ways in which the students understood certain phenomena in and aspects of the programming they were studying. For the purposes of the study, "programming" was considered in terms of two sorts of constituents: framework constituents which are those aspects of programming not normally thematized in instruction, and technical constituents, which are those that form the body of instruction and practice during the course. Three framework constituents (programming itself, programming languages, and learning to program) and three technical constituents (the function, recursion and correctness) have been singled out for study. In addition, the ways in which students approached writing programs in response to given problems were studied. Sets of ways in which the constituents studied were understood (conceptions of the constituents), and distinctly different approaches to writing programs for given problems have been identified, presented and discussed. The results which have been presented are discussed in three principle ways. First, they are where possible placed into the field of relevant research into learning and learning to program. Second, they are discussed for what they tell one about what it means to learn to program. Thirdly, they are discussed with respect to their inter-relatedness and integrated with reference to the work of the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch. Learning to program is characterized as a growing awareness of the field of programming, seen in terms of developing not only qualitatively better conceptions of the constituents of programming but also quantitatively more conceptions. The skill of programming is then seen as a capacity for intuitively drawing upon the appropriate conception in given circumstances. The experience of programming is seen as the fundamental way of generating such conceptions, elaborating them and differentiating them. Implications for teaching lie in the nature of the conceptions identified. Stress is placed on the framework constituents in that teaching should encourage well-founded conceptions through example. Teaching should not merely try to bring about expert behaviour in students by offering expert views on the content, but give students the range of challenges which enable them to come to the expert understanding via experience. Teachers should above all be aware of the range of conceptions held by their students, and that poor conceptions are not necessarily caught in lab exercises and examinations.