Programming Course Design: Phenomenographic Approach to Learning and Teaching

Resource type
Author/contributor
Title
Programming Course Design: Phenomenographic Approach to Learning and Teaching
Abstract
Phenomenography is a well-known empirical research approach that is often used to investigate students' ways of learning programming. Phenomenographic pedagogy is an instructional approach to plan learning and teaching activities. This theoretical paper gives an overview of prior research in phenomenographic studies of programming and shows how the results from these research studies can be applied to course design. Pedagogic principles grounded in the phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning are then presented that consider how to tie students' experiences to the course goals (relevance structure) and how to apply variation theory to focus on the desired critical aspects of learning. Building on this, an introductory object-oriented programming course is described as an example of research-based course design. The insights gained from the experience of running the course are shared with the community of computer science educators, as also the benefits and responsibilities for those who wish to adopt the phenomenographic perspective on learning to plan their teaching. The development of an increased awareness of the variation in students' ways of experiencing programming and the need to broaden the context of the programming course are discussed.
Date
2014-04
Proceedings Title
2014 International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Computing and Engineering
Conference Name
2014 International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Computing and Engineering
Pages
125-132
Short Title
Programming Course Design
Library Catalog
IEEE Xplore
Citation
Thota, N. (2014). Programming Course Design: Phenomenographic Approach to Learning and Teaching. 2014 International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Computing and Engineering, 125–132. https://doi.org/10.1109/LaTiCE.2014.30