Investigating the effectiveness of pattern-oriented instruction in enhancing self-regulated learning ability and programming performance in learning programming

Pattern-oriented instruction (POI) is one of the pedagogies in teaching and learning programming. It has been scrutinised to reinforce problem decomposition and problem-solving skills with cognitive schemas and patterns. Self-regulated Learning (SRL) abilities in learning programming reflect an individual’s cognitive schemas for approaching tasks, followed by other phrases of the undertaking and evaluating self-performance. Although POI shares the common ground of cognitive and metacognitive theories and is considered as an intervention for active schema recalling and monitoring on which SRL ability reflects as well, there is little research examining the potential of POI as an instructional intervention adoption for the change of students’ SRL abilities in learning programming. Besides, to understand more about POI intervention in a secondary school context, this research aims to investigate the effectiveness of POI adoption on students’ programming performance under the learning objectives of the Hong Kong technology education curriculum. Therefore, this research aims to research the capacity of POI in enhancing SRL ability in programming learning and programming performance among secondary school students. This study adopted a pretest-posttest control group design with random assignment of student subjects to two groups and the explanatory mixed-methods design (QUAN-QUAL model). It involved ten senior secondary school students and one class teacher. Student participants are divided into a POI intervention group and a control group to explore the research questions further. The results indicated that POI intervention significantly enhances SRL abilities, mainly on self-efficacy, intrinsic value and strategy use. Moreover, the results from the comparison of the two groups suggested that POI intervention has relative enhancement in programming performance. However, some negative feedback was observed in POI instruction about the current standardised tests. Students’ test anxiety is increased afterwards due to the time limitation for comprehending programming patterns and preparing for public exams.