Does Education Culture Influence Factors in Learning Programming: A Comparative Study between Two Universities across Continents

Ritu Sharma, Haifeng Shen

Abstract


Learning programming has been considered challenging by students and remains a daunting task for educators despite their efforts into finding innovative ways to teach programming. A lot of factors have been studied since 1970s and educators today are still trying to unearth the factors that play significant roles in learning programming. As most of the important research in this regard has been done in developed countries, it is imperative to understand whether differences in education culture between developed and developing country can influence how the factors affect learning of programming. This paper presents the results of a comparative study on the effects of differences in education culture between two universities in Australia and India respectively on the chosen factors in learning introductory programming. The results show that prior programming experience, gender, reason to study programming, attendance, and revision had different effects, while activities performed in the lecture theatre and preliminary preparation before lecture and lab had the same effect in the two universities. The findings help gain insight whether certain factors are culture dependent/independent so that educators can focus on the specific factors that will help students better learn programming in a particular education culture context.

https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.2.1


Keywords


Programming; Factors; Gender; Attendance; Preparation before lecture; Revision

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References


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