Promoting Students’ Progress-Monitoring Behavior during Block-Based Programming

Abstract

Providing students with adaptive feedback on their progress on programming problems has been shown to motivate students and improve their performance, but little is known about how such feedback might impact student self-regulated learning during programming. Self-regulated learning (SRL) involves student planning a task, monitoring their progress, and reflecting on the outcome. We explored students’ SRL behaviors, particularly progress monitoring, when programming using each of three different scaffolds. The first scaffold is a subgoal checklist for the given programming task, the second adds automated, binary completion feedback on each subgoal, and the third adaptively reflects an automated percent progress estimate of student progress on each. Through interviews and programming logs from 17 students solving a problem in a block-based programming environment, we investigated the extent to which each scaffold supported student SRL. Our qualitative study results suggest that all three scaffolds could be useful for student SRL, but students felt that a combination of the checklist and progress feedback provided them with a balance of autonomy and motivation to persevere in programming. Furthermore, our results suggest that explaining how the automated feedback system works may have encouraged students to reason about the feedback they receive, which was a key intended outcome to improve SRL during programming.