An Analysis of Tutors’ Adoption of Explicit Instructional Strategies in an Introductory Programming Course

Abstract

In this paper we analyse in detail how tutors of an undergraduate-level introductory programming course use two explicit instructional strategies in practice with their students. The two strategies they used were an explicit tracing strategy and a subgoal learning strategy. We explored what triggered their use of these strategies, how faithfully they followed the proposed strategies, and how they adapted it in practice to their classroom setting. We rely on literature on fidelity of implementation to assess tutors’ adoption of these strategies. The tracing strategy was much more used and with higher fidelity than the subgoal learning strategy. Tutors adopted both strategies with adaptations, simplifications and even combining them. From our observations we draw good and bad practices on the adoption of such explicit instructional strategies for future generations of tutors.