Capturing of Cognitive Processes During Object-Oriented Programming

From time immemorial, researchers were keen on identifying three important aspects of the human brain during a task, which include identifying the cognitive processes (CPs) involved in the task, a sequence in which these CPs occur, and in which part of the brain does this neural processing are active. Higher-order CPs are needed for computer programming. The obstacles that students face throughout the programming process are on a variety of cognitive levels. The goal of this work was to determine the set of CPs a student undergoes during the programming process. It will give an insight into individual differences in students’ cognitive abilities and can understand the cognitive difficulties the students face during the programming process. Based on this knowledge, teachers can scaffold students to improve their cognitive abilities. The methodology that has been adopted for identifying the CPs is concurrent verbal protocol analysis, which mainly comprises three steps – Transcription, Segmentation as well as Encoding. During segmentation, a sentence or set of sentences were marked from the transcript and inferred as various CPs by using Wang's Layered Reference model of the brain (LRMB) and Bloom's Taxonomy. The experiment was done in an object-oriented programming paradigm. Twenty-five questions in C++ were given to a group of 10 students for the collection of audio files. The participants were graduate and post-graduate students. Forty-two CPs have been identified. Since the inference of the CPs was a subjective process, an inter-rater reliability check was performed among the primary coder and the secondary coder and found to be consistent.