A collaborative approach to scaffold programming efficiency using spoken tutorials and its evaluation

Abstract

Computer scientists and educators have argued that teaching programming skills helps enhance thinking skills and good problem solving aptitude. Learning to program is difficult for many students. Although several factors that affect learning have been identified over the years, we are still far from a full understanding of why some students learn to program easily and quickly while others flounder. This paper addresses this challenge using spoken-tutorials as a collaborative scaffolding tool to develop programming efficacy and evaluation of the students programming abilities. The results of the study show that programming self-efficacy is influenced by prior experience, and the students' mental models of programming influences their self-efficacy, and both the mental model and self-efficacy have a direct effect on overall perfomance of the students. Mastery of programming skills in one these languages also contributed in improved performances in other languages.