Investigation of Students' Cognitive Processes in Computer Programming: A Cognitive Ethnography Study

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to investigate how cognitive processes of students categorized as novice, semi-expert and expert differ in terms of creating pseudocode for a given programming task. To conduct this aim, cognitive ethnography research design was employed to reveal the cognitive process of the participants behind the specified task. In the study, three undergraduate students from a Computer Education and Instructional Technology (CEIT) department were included as participants. These students were categorized based on two parameters. The first one was the courses that took and the second on was their experiences on programming. While selecting participants, purposeful and snowball sampling methods were used. To collect data, semi-structured interviews, video recording, think aloud procedure, retrospective reviews, observations and document analysis were used. The results showed that participants differed in terms of their decision making and task completion durations, the path they followed, and their perspectives about handling the question.