Bloom’s Taxonomy Based Approach to Learn Basic Programming Loops

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a study on the difficulties 46 Biomedical Engineering students show in a particular topic of the first programming course, the loop topic. Students' results in programming courses are often very disappointing and to improve these results it is fundamental to understand the type of difficulties students feel when they are leaning how to program. Most of the researches are too generic and do not report on specific programming topics and we consider important to be more specific. To achieve this purpose we organized a test, using the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, where all of the questions were about the programming loop topic. We did a statistical analysis based on the grades students obtained on each question of the test and we concluded that the approach we followed has clear pedagogical advantages to weaker students, making them more confident and motivated and allows teachers to use adequate strategies to each of the identified students' difficulties. The authors propose, in the next future, a set of visual methodologies to be used with the students, which they expect can contribute to delineate a more motivating teaching strategy in overcoming students' difficulties.