A Quasi-Experimental Design to Evaluate the Use of PythonTutor on Programming Laboratory Session

Abstract

Abstract—Educational tool is one of the prominent solutions for aiding students to learn course material in Information Technology (IT) domain. However, most of them are not used in practice since they do not properly fit student necessity. This paper evaluates the impact of an educational tool, namely PythonTutor, for completing programming laboratory task regarding data structure materials. Such evaluation will be conducted in one semester by implementing a quasi-experimental design. As a result, six findings can be deducted which are: 1) PythonTutor might positively affect student performance when the students have used such tool before; 2) Sometimes, student perspective regarding the impact of educational tool is not always in-sync with actual laboratory result; 3) the impact of PythonTutor might be improved when similar data representation is used consequently for several weeks; 4) the correlation between the use of PythonTutor and student performance might not be significant when the control and intervened group share completely different characteristics; 5) the students might experience some difficulties when they are asked to handle a big task for the first time; and 6) the students might be able to complete a particular weekly task with a promising result if the students have understood the material well.