| dc.description.abstract | Many vocational high schools attach great importance to programming courses, which were designed to develop students’ problem solving skills. However, programming courses hardly mention the planning of problem solving and programming practices, and this make beginners having difficulties on learning programming. By using concept map, learners can use graphical representation to show their conceptual understanding of the program. On the other hand, project-based learning increases learner’s actual programming practice time, and thus sharpens their problem-solving skill. This research use field experiment to explore the effect of using concept map and project-based approach on learning performance.
The participants were recruited from a vocational high school in Taichung city; we randomly chose one class from the second grade and another from the third grade, a total of eighty-five students as our experiment participants. The participants were divided into two groups (independent learning and cooperative learning) based on classes. This research used Visual Basic 6.0 as the teaching software, and conducted a seven weeks field experiment including pre-test and post-test. In the experiment, a course teacher was responsible for teaching and designing course worksheet. Of the eighty-five participants, all but six successfully completed the experiment. By the end of the experiment, we used questionnaires and experiment test to collect experimental data; and used statistical analysis methods to conduct further data analysis.
The results showed that the average programming test score of cooperative learning group is higher than independent learning group. In terms of the overall samples, learners with moderate or high prior knowledge have greater testing scores. In the independent learning group, learners possessing higher level of prior knowledge have lower learning performance. In the cooperative learning group, the learning performance from high to low, are high prior knowledge learners, low prior knowledge learners, and moderate prior knowledge learners.
This study provided implications and directions for future research according to the above results. | en_US |