The didactic focus based categorisation system, which was developed in the previous section, has two benefits. First, it can be used to illustrate what the community of researchers has seen important and relevant enough to study. Therefore, the categorisation system has a potential to reveal something about the state of research in some particular sub-area of educational research. Second, the categorisation system can be used to bring forward less studied research areas and thus it can be used as a tool to find new and relevant research questions. Furthermore, the content of the categories can be analysed in more detail to highlight which aspects, for instance, of student characteristics have been included in the analysis. This information helps to analyse in a more detailed manner, which research questions would benefit from further research.
A quick glance over Table 5 reveals that the vast majority of the research on challenges during the instructional process in introductory programming courses (CS1/2) discussed the challenges from the course level perspective. Research concerning the organisation/community aspects was almost non-existent. The same was true for the society level. This is somewhat surprising, as teachers are generally not completely free to select their course content, the learning resources or teaching methods used. The pressures and guiding principles from the organisation level, as well as available resources may have substantial effects on the students’ success, but little research was found concerning this aspect.
Another significant aspect of the material in Table 5 is that there are some rows where there were only few studies placed in cells. The topics relating to course goals and content, students’ perceptions of teachers or vice versa, and teachers’
conceptions of students’ attitudes and students’ understanding of goals and content were less studied areas. Additionally, topics teachers’ characteristics, qualification, education, conceptions of course/degree goals, content, and students’ studying process were analysed only in one or two studies.
It is not possible to make any far-reaching conclusions on the state of research based on the limited pool of studies that were used as a data in this example. However, it is possible to observe some general trends concerning what the community of researchers in the fields of computing education (CE) and computer science education (CSE) have seen as relevant topics to study.
In contrast, there were many studies that focused on the students’ characteristics, their studying and the results they gained through studying. Many studies also analysed how students understood the course content. In these studies, the difficulty of the course content was approached from the students’ point of view. Studies concentrated on revealing how difficult certain course topics were for students to learn, according to the teacher or the students themselves. However, which course topics were difficult to teach, was a much less studied area. Finally, some studies discussed the social or cultural learning environment and the difficulties that related to them. In general, there were not many such studies published in the field of CE or CSE. Furthermore, most of these publications discussed the environment in more general settings than introductory programming courses.
The previous observations are an example of how the categorisation system that is based on a didactic focus can be useful to highlight the areas that are less studied.
This knowledge can then be further used to analyse whether those less studied areas would provide new research topics. Another advantage of the didactic focus based
categorisation is that, if needed, the studies in different categories can be observed more closely to find out how some research questions were approached. As an example, I include below (Table 6) a list of references of the studies on factors that predicted or explained the students’ success in a CS1 course. Out of the 13 studies five focused only on the students’ characteristics (category 2) and the results of the studying process (category 5.3). Three studies had an additional focus on the students’ conceptions of the course goal and content (category 5.1). This added focus concentrated for the most part on the students’ self-efficacy beliefs, concerning their ability to learn programming. Finally, five studies focused also on the actions students undertook to achieve the goals (category 5.2). A closer examination of the actions that were analysed reveals that many studies emphasised general studying preferences such as the deep and surface approaches to learning or aspects of self-regulated learning. The actual actions observed were limited to the number of working hours and game playing during the course. The focus of these studies was on the student and the studied factors were often quantitative by nature. This indicates that there are overlooked aspects of the instructional process that would need closer investigation. Extending the focus, for instance, to students’ actual studying related actions (e.g., lecture attendance and usage of learning material/environment) or teachers’ pedagogical actions would strengthen the knowledge of the factors that affect students’ success and failure.
Table 6 An example of the studies on factors that predicted or explained the students’ success in a CS1 course
References didactic focus
(Bennedsen and Caspersen 2005) 2 5.3
(Byrne and Lyons 2001) 2 5.3
(Pillay and Jugoo 2005) 2 5.3
(Pioro 2006) 2 5.3
(Mancy and Reid 2004) 2 5.3
(Ramalingam et al. 2004) 2 5.1 (self-efficacy) 5.3
(Rountree et al. 2004) 2 5.1 (perceptions on difficulty, work load) 5.3
(Wiedenbeck 2005) 2 5.1 (self-efficacy) 5.3
(Bergin and Reilly 2006) 2 5.1 (self-efficacy) 5.2 (game playing) 5.3 (Bergin et al. 2005) 2 5.1 (task value) 5.2 (self-reg. learning) 5.3
(Cantwell Wilson 2002) 2 5.1 (comfort level) 5.2 (work style) 5.3
(Simon et al. 2006) 2 5.1 (attitudes to studying) 5.2 (deep and surface) 5.3
(Ventura 2005) 2 5.1 (comfort level) 5.2 (working hours) 5.3
As a summary, the analysis based on the didactic focus of the research on difficulties during the instructional process in CS1/2 courses highlights that there are some research areas that are clearly overlooked. These areas provide a pool of possible research questions that would help the community of CS teachers and CSE researchers to gain more comprehensive understanding of the instructional process and the challenges during it. For example, CS teachers in general and their conceptions of goals, students and studying processes are areas that would need more research. The importance of finding out more about CS teachers’ conceptions and beliefs concerning teaching and learning is evident, as it has been shown that teachers’ conceptions are in relation to teachers’ approach to teaching (Kember and Kwan 2000). Furthermore, the study by Samuelowicz and Bain (2001) provided evidence that there were fundamental differences in teachers’ orientations towards
teaching. Teaching-centred beliefs focused on the teaching or teacher or transferring the established discipline knowledge. Learning-centred beliefs focused on learning or the student’s role or students’ knowledge construction. However, it seems that there are several factors affecting teachers’ orientations. The categorised studies have shown that a teacher’s orientation to teaching and learning is in relation to taught discipline and the teaching context (Lindblom-Ylänne et al. 2006 June), the higher education environment (Tutty et al. 2008) and to the way teachers understand their subject matter (Martin et al. 2000; Prosser et al. 2005). Therefore, to improve the quality of teaching and further the quality of the learning outcomes, it is important to discover more about CS teachers’ conceptions and the factors that affect the teachers’ choices in real life situations. The research results of Trigwell et al. (1999) suggest that the teachers’ approach to teaching is in relation to the students’ approach to learning (deep or surface learning). Thus, in order to encourage students’ deep approach to learning one has to apply such approaches to teaching that are in line with a deep approach to learning. However, the first step in affecting the teachers’
approaches to teaching is to find out their conceptions of studying, teaching and the goals of the instructional process.
Other research questions, the study of which would contribute to the development of CS education, concern the social and cultural environment. Especially, since several CS departments report high drop-out rates from their degree programs, it would be beneficial to gain more information on the characteristics of the environment and how students perceive it. This would shed light on the reasons behind drop-out rates and thus act as a starting point for development work.
Last but not least, yet importantly, the analysis highlighted that there were very few studies done about the organisation and society levels. However, the university as a teaching organisation affects the teachers in many ways, for example, by giving a certain amount of resources. Therefore, it would be beneficial to do research on under what kind of restrictions and pressures the teachers need to work in reality.
These concrete aspects need to be taken into account when planning and implementing a new pedagogical approach or intervention.
5 The feedback loop model – the system theoretical approach to the instructional process
Chapter 4 introduced the “dimension doughnut” and the three-layered didactic triangle that shed light on the multidimensional nature of the instructional process. However, neither of these analysis models is able to address the process nature of instruction.
Therefore, this chapter introduces a system-theoretical approach to tackle this aspect of instruction. The first part of the chapter introduces the main tenets of general system theory (GST). In the second part of the chapter, general system theory is applied to the instructional process and the developed feedback loop model figure is introduced. This developed model is explicitly built on the main tenets of general system theory. In the third part of the chapter, the phases of the instructional process and the nature of the feedback during the process are discussed in more detail.