Manuscript received February 28, 2023; revised May 15, 2023; accepted July 21, 2023.
Abstract—Learning Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
concepts is a challenging task for novice learners. Previous
research has examined the impact of either conceptual or
practical knowledge on students’ comprehension of OOP;
however, there is a lack of integration between these two
knowledge bases. This study proposes a novel approach that
integrates theoretical and practical knowledge of OOP using a
concept map to create a unified cognitive diagram that reflects
the educator’s understanding of the subject matter. This
diagram is then used as the basis for a recomposition activity
that supports student learning. An experiment is conducted in a
classroom environment with 75 undergraduate grade-2
university students to investigate the effects of the proposed
method. The experimental results showed that the proposed
method significantly improved students’ comprehension of
OOP concepts, doubling their performance compared to the
conventional method from pre-test to post-test. In addition, the
proposed approach has the potential for early identification of
low-performing students, thus allowing educators to provide
targeted support to improve their learning outcomes. The
integrated cognitive diagram approach proposed in this study
has practical implications for educators seeking to improve the
teaching of OOP concepts and identify and support
low-performing students.
Index Terms—concept map, recomposition, Object-Oriented
Programming (OOP) concepts, conceptual representation,
theoretical knowledge, practical knowledge, concept
comprehension
N. Khudhur, Y. Hayashi, and T. Hirashima are with the Graduate School
of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima
739-8527, Japan.
Nurmaya was with Faculty of Information Technology, Universitas Yarsi,
Jakarta Pusat 1051, Indonesia.
*Correspondence: nawras@lel.hiroshima-u.ac.jp (N.K.)
Cite: Nawras Khudhur*, Nurmaya, Yusuke Hayashi, and Tsukasa Hirashima, "Conceptual Representation of the Source-Code to Support the Learning of Object-Oriented Programming Concepts," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 1858-1867, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).