A study of an advance organizer as a technique for teaching computer programming concepts

Abstract

Research on instructional methods has suggested that advance organizers (e.g., metaphors) can be an effective tool in teaching certain types of material in some situations. In many cases, teaching computer programming concepts satisfies these criteria. In our research, beginning programming students were trained on the syntax of arrays. A training session consisted of reading a tutorial manual and entering lines of source code into an interactive system. One group was given a metaphorical organizer prior to training (an advance organizer). A second group received the organizer after training. A control group read a passage on computer history prior to training. The groups did not differ on training task performance or on a test of syntactic knowledge (near transfer). However, the advance organizer group did significantly better on a test of semantic knowledge (far transfer). Factors relating to when to use an advance organizer are discussed.