Lane, H. C.,
& VanLehn, K. (2005) Teaching program planning skills to novices with
natural language tutoring. Computer
Science Education, 15(3), 183-201. .
For
beginning programmers, inadequate problem solving and planning skills are among
the most salient of their weaknesses. In this paper, we test the efficacy of
natural language tutoring to teach and scaffold acquisition of these skills. We
describe ProPl, a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system that elicits goal
decompositions and program plans from students in natural language. The system
uses a variety of tutoring tactics that leverage students' intuitive
understandings of the problem, how it might be solved, and the underlying
concepts of programming. We report the results of a small-scale evaluation comparing
students who used ProPl with a control group who read the same content. Our
primary findings are that students who received tutoring from ProPl seem to
have developed an improved ability to solve the composition problem and
displayed behaviors that suggest they were able to think at greater levels of
abstraction than students in the read-only group.