| Summary: | 碩士 === 臺北市立教育大學 === 資訊科學系碩士班 === 101 === Taiwan has been known for its information technology research and development, and the computer programming is supposed to be key competence of students who graduate from computer science departments. Recursion is not only one of the important concepts of programming, but it is also utilized as a skill of programming and as a means of problem solving. However, students are not generally seen to work effectively when learning the recursive concepts because most of them cannot finish writing a well-designed program of recursion, the essence of which has frequently confused the novices in particular so much that they have difficulties developing proper mental models. Programming novices, as a result, lose their interests and confidence in designing recursive programs. In this research, a recursive programming learning system is developed, and a learning experiment is carried out to investigate the effect of novices’ recursion learning achievement, learning attitudes, and self-efficacy.
The study adopts single-group quasi-experiment design to conduct an experiment of recursive program learning. The experimental group consisted of 47 students who take the course of data structure offered by the Department of Computer Science of a university in Taipei City. After two-time system operating training, the students are asked to work on their own self-directed learning out of the school time. The experiment lasts for 1.5 months. The instruments including recursion achievement test, recursion learning attitude, recursion self-efficacy, evaluation of recursion learning system are used for measuring the programming effects. In addition, this study analyzes the correlation between the learners’ habits, time, frequency to login the system, and the learners’ progressive improvement of recursion after using the recursion learning system.
The major findings are shown as follows:
1. This study adopted the web technology to develop a recursion learning system (ARLS for short) with tutor agent mechanism, dynamic assessment and multimedia materials. Over 60% students showed positive attitudes toward the learning effect of recursion after one and half month testing ARLS. Most of experts considered the system will be useful for assisting undergraduate students to learn recursive concepts.
2. There are significant improvements on recursion achievement test for low and medium recursion achievement students. There is significant difference between novices’ mental model on base case and passive flow. There is an apparently positive relation among the learners’ progressive improvement of recursion, the frequency to login the system¸ and use of recursion learning media.
3. The difference among the learners’ recursion learning attitudes on the dimension of interest, confidence, and usefulness is significant.
4. There is significant difference among the learners’ recursion self-efficacy on the dimension of hard-working, facing challenging, and the influence of environment.
Further, in order to promote the learners’ interest and increase the learners’ recursion self-efficacy, game-based learning strategy and incentive mechanism is useful for teaching recursion concepts in the future study.
|
|---|
