THE EFFECT OF PAIR PROGRAMMING ACTIVITY ON THE PROGRAMMING SUCCESS OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Serkan Demiroren
Ankara University

Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluating effectiveness of pair programming. The experimental period of the research is applied to 36 sixth grade students from a secondary school in Ankara at 2014 – 2015 spring semester. The research work has been designed and realized with the posttest experimental pattern with control group. Independent variable of the research is students being pair or alone in programming sessions. The two group take the same instruction and we just look for the effect of pair working. The dependent variable of the research is programming achievement of students. The students’ logical thinking abilities were used as control variable (covariate) to reduce bias on results. Group Assessmentof Logical Thinking was used to measure students’ logical thinking ability. A programming achievement test has been developed to measure students programming success. For the test, expert opinion was received from three information technologies teachers. The test pre examined in different secondary school with 65 students which already taken Scratch programming course. On the single factor that arises from the posttest application of the performance variable that belong to the students working as pair or alone and using Group Test of Logical Thinking results as control variable ; ANCOVA test has been applied. All assumptions has been tested fort this analysis. According to the obtained findings, between the pair working students and alone working students there is no significant difference on the students’ programming achievement.

Keywords

Computational thinking, Pair programming, Programming instruction, Scratch.

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