Relating theory and practice in laboratory work: a variation theoretical study

Abstract

Computer programming education has practice-oriented as well as theory-oriented learning goals. Here, lab work plays an important role in students' learning. It is however widely reported that many students face great difficulties in learning theory as well as practice. This paper investigates the important but problematic relation between the learning of theory and the learning of practice for novice programming students. A phenomenographic and variation theoretical analysis on novice students' understanding of concepts is combined with a variation theoretical analysis on students' programming activities. It is shown that different levels of practical proficiency as well as different levels of conceptual understandings are related to dimensions of variation. The paper proposes a way to describe how students' learning of practice and concepts are related. In this way it extends traditional use of phenomenography and variation theory by discussing students' learning of practice as well as concepts, and specifically how these relate.

Learning Computer Science

“…The oval in the figure denotes the what aspects that we describe in this article: (1) the direct object of learning (related to CS theory and practice skills) and (2) the dimensions of variation and the values of dimensions (henceforth VoDs) therein. Following the reasoning in prior work [Eckerdal 2015], the direct object of learning CS relates to learning theory as well as learning to do practice (e.g., reading, writing, testing, and debugging code). We analyzed the respondents' accounts of their experiences and identified the qualitative differences in the learning experience as the dimensions of variation.…”

Multidimensional analysis of creative coding MOOC forums

“…This focus on the practical part of the course is not highlighted in the two frameworks used, but seems to be characteristic of how students learn computer science. Previous research has pointed to the important and complex role of practice for novice programming students' learning of both the theoretical and practical learning goals [4,8]. If students are stuck on the practical implementation details, they might have a problem to proceed and learn, not only the practice but also the theory.…”

Learning facilitating leadership

“…A special feature of our course is that we don't expect the engineering students to define a problem or propose specific problem solutions, but to facilitate the client organisation to do so. The course also shares similar intentions with another well-known education programme for engineering students, namely the CDIO (Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate) approach (Crawley et al, 2014;Edström and Kolmos, 2014;Bennedsen et.al. 2014;Cloutier et.al.…”

“…The structure of this course does not strictly follow the paradigm of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) (Chan, 2016;De Graaff, 2016;Edström and Kolmos, 2014;Illeris, 2007;Boud and Feletti, 1997;Sobral, 1995). In contrast to PBL, "problems" are not seen as the "…starting point for the learning processes" (Edström and Kolmos, 2014:544).…”