Learning programming through stepwise self-explanations

Abstract

In this article we present an approach where students self-explain small pieces of code while they are studying the process of building programs from videos used as instructional material. To evaluate our approach, we carried out an experiment in which we compared it with another approach where students self-studied the same videos. Although we could not confirm that the difference between the two groups was significant, we found a positive correlation within the instructional group between participants' answers to the self-explanation questions and participants' final results. Besides that, participants provided positive feedback regarding our approach. These findings suggest our approach should be investigated in further detail, especially with regard to which instructional conditions are more effective for it.