Aligning and Assessing Teaching Approaches With SOLO Taxonomy in a Computer Programming Course

A teaching approach plays an important role in teaching and learning process of an introductory programming (IP) course. The teaching approach should focus on different programming skills required by novice programmers. In this study, we introduced the teaching and learning approach based on an ADRI (Approach, Deployment, Result, Improvement) approach in the IP course which focuses on both programming knowledge (syntax and semantics) and problem solving strategies. We compared the teaching and learning approach of the IP course with the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. We assessed the students’ performance by using different assessment tasks based on the four stages of the ADRI approach. Results show that the current teaching and learning approach of the IP course addressed all the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. The students’ performance in the Approach and Result stages (82%) are good, and the performance in the Improvement (71%) and Deployment (69%) stages are satisfactory. Overall, the ADRI approach provides positive impact on the teaching and learning process of the IP course.