Pre-service and in-service teachers' experiences of learning to program in an object-oriented language

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the various ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers experience learning to program in an object-oriented language. Both groups of teachers were enrolled in university courses. In most cases, the pre-service teachers were learning to program for the first time, while the in-service teachers had previously programmed using a procedural programming language. Phenomenography was used to identify categories of description of learning to program. From these categories an outcome space was created that shows the relationship between different experiences of learning to program. The outcome space can be represented as circles inscribed within one another, where the innermost circle represents a lower level of cognitive accomplishment and the outer circles subsume the inner circles. The five levels of the outcome space are: meeting the requirements, learning the syntax/learning by comparison, understanding and assimilating, problem solving and programming in the large. Implications of the findings for teaching are discussed.