Using Learners' Self-Explanations of Subgoals to Guide Initial Problem Solving in App Inventor

Our goal for the present research was to improve upon the subgoal learning framework and further enhance problem solving performance for novice programmers learning to use a block-based programming language. In particular, we are expanding upon recent work done by Margulieux and Morrison that prompts learners to self-explain the subgoals, or functional pieces, of a problem solving process to create their own instructional explanations of the process. We added to this work by exploring whether learners' self-explained instructions could be used to effectively scaffold initial problem solving attempts (i.e., practice problems) to further improve performance. In this experiment, learners self-explained subgoals using the most successful conditions from Margulieux and Catrambone's [1] prior work and then were given practice problems that were either unscaffolded (control condition), scaffolded with their own subgoal explanations, or scaffolded with explanations constructed by an instructional designer and computer scientist. Learners who were scaffolded with their own explanations performed better on later problem solving (i.e., an assessment test) than those scaffolded with the experts' explanations or those with no scaffolding. The results show that scaffolding initial problem solving with learners' explanations of the problem solving process can lead to better problem solving performance than scaffolding from experts if the learners construct explanations with adequate support.