Benefits of Self-explanation in Introductory Programming

One approach for helping students learn to program is the use of self-explanation assignments. In these assignments, students explain instructional materials using domain knowledge covered in the course. In this work, we describe a randomized experiment where students in an introductory programming course were given two kinds of self-explanation assignments. One randomly selected group worked on self-explanation assignments with supporting questions while the alternate group had the same self-explanation questions but no additional supporting exercises. The combined groups performed better on comparable test questions than students from the previous year, who did not use self-explanation questions. The group with supporting questions performed better than the group with no additional support. Based on our results and previous research on self explanation, we argue that embedding self-explanation questions into programming material is beneficial for students. Moreover, further gains are achieved from supporting questions that help focus their explanations