Pattern-oriented Instruction and Students' Abstraction Skills

Abstract

Pattern-oriented instruction (POI) is an instructional computer science (CS) approach that relies on algorithmic patterns (APs). Teaching through APs has been shown to help students acknowledge APs and incorporate them into their solutions, thus demonstrating abstraction skills. In this work, we examine the connection between POI and students' abstraction performance in a wider context. We show that introducing APs by using POI, either partially or in a full manner, is an effective choice for encouraging several types of abstraction skills.