Abstract
The SimProgramming teaching approach has the goal to help students overcome their learning difficulties in the transition from entry-level to advanced computer programming and prepare them for real-world labour environments, adopting learning strategies. It immerses learners in a business-like learning environment, where students develop a problem-based learning activity with a specific set of tasks, one of which is filling weekly individual forms.
We conducted thematic analysis of 401 weekly forms, to identify the students’ strategies for self-regulation of learning during assignment. The students are adopting different strategies in each phase of the approach. The early phases are devoted to organization and planning, later phases focus on applying theoretical knowledge and hands-on programming. Based on the results, we recommend the development of educational practices to help students conduct self-reflection of their performance during tasks.
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Acknowledgments
Pedrosa, D. wishes to thank the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, for Ph.D. Grant SFRH/BD/87815/2012.
This work was partly financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project «POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961», and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) as part of project «UID/EEA/50014/2013».
We would like to thank all the students and teachers who collaborated on this research.
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Pedrosa, D., Cravino, J., Morgado, L., Barreira, C. (2016). Self-regulated Learning in Computer Programming: Strategies Students Adopted During an Assignment. In: Allison, C., Morgado, L., Pirker, J., Beck, D., Richter, J., Gütl, C. (eds) Immersive Learning Research Network. iLRN 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 621. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41769-1_7
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