Learning JAVA Programming in Teams
Huey-Wen Chou
National Central University
Taiwan
hwc928@gmail.com
Abstract
In educational literature, close relationships among instructional design, cognitive
load, and learning performance have been found. Because of the differences in personal
characteristics between learners, instructors have to adjust instructional design
accordingly in order to promote learners’ learning performance. This study employed
JAVA programming language as learning subject to investigate whether different
grouping types and prior knowledge level make differences in learners’ learning
performance by a field experiment.
The study followed a 2 × 2 quasi-experimental design with two independent
variables “prior knowledge” (high and low) and “grouping types” (homogeneous and
heterogeneous). The dependent variable was “learning performance” which includes
cognitive and affective domains. A six-week field experiment including 134
undergraduates majoring in information management was conducted. The results are as
following:
1.
Subjects who have different prior knowledge level have significant difference in
learning performance.
2.
Female learners scored significant higher in learning enjoyment.
According to the results above, implications for future research and directions were
provided at the end.
Keywords: prior knowledge, grouping types, learning performance, learning enjoyment, JAVA
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1. Introduction
The pedagogical practice of group projects helps students to learn how to corporate
with others (Gallavan & Juliano, 2007). Team-based project requires some degree of
cognitive collaboration (Schellens & Valcke, 2005). Cognitive collaboration within
group members, people can not only mutually support others (Van Boxtel, Van der
Linden, & Kanselaar, 2000) but also learn the knowledge from group members and
therefore results in an effective learning as well as accomplishes more complicated tasks
(Laughlin, Bonner, & Miner, 2002). Therefore, it’s important to foster students to have
positive attitude toward teamwork. In this regard, this study investigates how
team-based learning process affects individual learning performance as well as learner’s
attitude toward teamwork.
In the field of information technology discipline, programming language is one of
the important training targets. Successful mastery of different programming languages
requires the abilities of logical thinking and problem solving, as well as the knowledge
of programming command. Each person has his or her own approach in understanding
and analyzing the problem and evolving a solution plan. The way that a student writes
computer commands, algorithms and scripts reflects his (her) unique cognitive process.
These cognitive activities will be manifest through each person’s computer code writing
(Choi, Deek, & Im, 2009). Among these programming languages, JAVA is one of the
most widely adopted languages in writing the Internet based business computer
applications. This study therein employs JAVA programming language as the learning
subject to investigate whether learners of different prior knowledge levels when
grouped in homogeneous or heterogeneous learning environment will have different
learning performances.
Gagné (1992) indicated that there are many factors that can influence individual
learning process and outcomes. External factors include instructional design and
learning environment whereas internal factors are personal characteristics such as
motivation, prior knowledge, cognitive style, and apprehension. Prior knowledge and
learning environment were two variables to be manipulated in this study. This study
employs prior knowledge to group learners to homogeneous and heterogeneous groups
in which learners of homogeneous group learners are having similar prior knowledge
level and learners of heterogeneous group learning are having different prior knowledge
level.
2. Research Method
This study focuses on two different levels of prior knowledge (high and low) and
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grouping types (homogeneous and heterogeneous) and investigates how they differently
impact on learning performance. Independent variables include prior knowledge and
grouping types. Dependent variable includes learners’ learning performance after a
series experiment of collaborative learning. Learning performance will be measured by
two domains: cognitive and affective.
( 1 ) Prior knowledge
Dochy et al. (1996) described that before taking lessons, learners already possessed
specific knowledge related to the learning subjects which is called prior knowledge. In
this study, C programming language was chosen to be the prior knowledge to JAVA
programming language. So, this study employed subjects’ previous C programming
language as the indicator of their prior knowledge. Prior knowledge was divided into
high prior knowledge and low prior knowledge based on the average score of C
programming language class. The cutting score is 75. The scores over 75 were classified
as high prior knowledge, and the rest others were classified as low prior knowledge.
( 2 ) Grouping types
According to the level of prior knowledge (high prior knowledge and low prior
knowledge), this study randomly grouped the subjects with similar prior knowledge
level into homogeneous groups, and those with different prior knowledge into
heterogeneous groups. The homogeneous prior knowledge group includes two types:
high and low.
(3) Learning performance
Learning performance refers to knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes that
learners will attain after learning (Gordon, 2010). From literatures review, there are
three educational objectives about learning performance. The first one is cognitive
domain. It refers to cognition and understanding about learning objectives. The second
is affective domain which is about learning attitude, liking, or impression. This study
measured subject’s learning enjoyment after the experiment as the indicator of affective
domain of learning performance. In order to eliminate the effects of pre-test scores from
post-test scores, this study employs the pre-test scores as a covariate variable. This
study proposes the following two hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. Learners with the same prior knowledge level but are in different
grouping types will have significant different learning performance and learning
enjoyment.
Hypothesis 2. There are significant gender differences in learning performance and
enjoyment.
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The participants in this study were 134 undergraduates majoring in information
management from a university in Taiwan, with 87 males and 47 females. All
participants have already studied C programming language for one semester, and
possessed basic logical concepts, related knowledge, and programming skills. The
students were randomly grouped with 3 members in each group based on their prior
knowledge level. A total of 45 groups was made and was employed in the field
experiment.
The learning material in this experiment was selected topics of JAVA programming
language focusing on control structure, specifically, control statement and looping
statement. The control statements included “if…else” and “switch case” two control
statements, and “while”, “do…while”, and “for” three looping statements. This course
consists of a three-hour lecture and a two-hour laboratory session in each week. These
topics are very fundamental and important to programming language.
The study followed a 2 × 2 quasi-experimental design with two independent
variables “prior knowledge” and “grouping types”. Prior knowledge was separated into
high prior knowledge and low prior knowledge and grouping types contained
homogeneous group and heterogeneous group. A total of forty-five groups with 29
homogeneous groups (including 14 groups with three low prior knowledge members,
and 15 groups with three high prior knowledge members) and 16 heterogeneous (mixed)
groups (consisting of one/two high prior knowledge and two/one low prior knowledge
members in each group) except the last group with two students only. The data of
two-member group was not used for further analysis. The duration of the experiment
was six weeks (including two weeks for pre-test and post-test), from March 2, 2011 to
April 13, 2011.
In the first week, the researcher introduced the purposes, procedure, and schedule
to the experiment. A pre-test on JAVA knowledge was administered to all participants
afterwards. The test scores would be contrasted to the post-test scores.
The experiment lasted for four consecutive weeks and was held in the two-hour
laboratory session with each included two major activities. The first activity was a
group-based collaborative learning process to solve a learning task which was related to
the last week’s instruction. This task could engage students in communication with team
members and collaboration with each other to effectively solve the task. The solution to
the programming task should be typed in computer and compiled after group
collaborative discussion. After finishing the task, each subject filled out the
questionnaire which included questionnaire measuring on learning enjoyment and
personal profile. Weekly learning achievement test was administered on the first twenty
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minutes of the lecture class in each of the four experimental weeks. And the
achievement test items are related to the laboratory collaborative task and class
instruction given in the previous last week. The post-test was conducted in the sixth
week to examine the treatment effect. Learning performance was operationalized by the
post-test scores with pre-test scores as covariate.
3. Results
The descriptive statistics of four-week achievement test scores revealed that high
level of prior knowledge learners could get higher score (
ranged from 83.50 to 96.89)
than low level of prior knowledge learners ( ranged from 71.50 to 87.71) on average.
The descriptive statistics of learning enjoyment for collaborative learning in laboratory
class revealed that different types of group were all pretty high ( ranged from 3.94 to
4.36). But high prior knowledge learners in homogeneous groups changed dramatically
and became much more joyful (
were from 3.94 to 4.27).
Two-way ANCOVA with pre-test scores as the covariate and learning performance
as the dependent variable was employed to test H1. Pre-test score had a significant
effect on learning performance (p value of 0.012). Learners with different level of prior
knowledge had significant different scores in learning performance (p value of 0.014).
The average score for high prior knowledge learners and low prior knowledge learners
were 87.87 and 77.59 respectively. Nevertheless, different grouping types did not have
significant impact on subject’s learning performance but in learning enjoyment.
Regarding the gender difference, the results revealed gender did not make significant
differences in learning performance (male:
= 83.45; female:
did have significant differences in learning enjoyment (male:
4.38; p < 0.01).
= 82.53; p > 0.1) but
= 3.92; female:
=
4. Conclusion and Implications
This study applied two different levels of prior knowledge and three grouping
types to conduct a six-week experiment and investigated how the above factors impact
on learning performance. This study found that there were significant differences in
learning performance between different prior knowledge levels. This finding is
consistent with Dochy’s (1996), Shin, Schallert, and Savente’s (1994) and Alexander’s
(1996) research that prior knowledge could affect learning outcome.
Different grouping types did not have significant differences in learning
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performance. But most learners in any grouping types could gradually perform better.
This implies that teamwork is in fact beneficial to all participants no matter what
groupings they are in. Grouping types did not have significant differences in learning
enjoyment either. Mixed groups perceived higher learning enjoyment than either high
prior knowledge or low prior knowledge groups do. In addition, there were no
significant gender differences in learning performance. Nevertheless, this study found
that female students obtained significant higher learning enjoyment than male students
did.
Implications
There is no doubt that prior knowledge had an effect on learning performance. This
study confirmed that learners with different prior knowledge need different types of
grouping. In specific, arranging low level of prior knowledge learners in heterogeneous
groups could help those learners attain helps from high level of prior knowledge
learners.
Although enhancing learners’ performance in cognitive and psychomotor domains
is important, affective domain of learning performance cannot be ignored during the
entire collaborative learning process. This study found that female participants had
higher learning enjoyment during collaborative JAVA learning process. Therefore,
mixing genders in groups may help learners attain better learning enjoyment.
Lastly, this study found that low prior knowledge learners who were grouped
together would spend more time in lab tasks. It is suggested that low prior knowledge
learners be grouped with more capable learning partners so that they would have more
knowledge source to learn from.
Research Limitations
The first limitation is that this study used convenient sample to conduct experiment.
Because of the space constraints, only 44 groups were included in this study. It is
suggested that future study replicates the experiment with a larger sample size. Secondly,
this study employed a six-week experiment to collect data which may not be long
enough to foster a sense of stable collaborative atmosphere. In addition, this study only
analyzed quantitative data, some group dynamics phenomena might not be reflected on
a quantitative-based way. These qualitative phenomena could only be observed during
the experiment. It is suggested that in the future, researchers can take qualitative
approach to complement quantitative results, such as record and analyze the
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conversation contents, observe group dynamics, and conduct in-depth interviews with
participants.
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