The effect of different usage of the educational programming language in programming education on the programming anxiety and achievement

The abstract structure, logic, negative perceptions, and anxiety of programming are seen as obstacles to novice programmers. The importance of educational programming languages is increasing day by day in overcoming these obstacles. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the effect of educational programming language integration on academic achievement and programming anxiety level. The pretest–posttest test design without control group, which is one of the experimental methods, was used in the study, which was carried out on three groups consisting of the theory, practice and integration of the course into both theory and practice part. The groups determined by random sampling method consist of 87 people, 61 boys and 26 girls. Pretest–posttest method was used to determine academic success. During the application process, five performance tests were used to determined the change in success. The scale developed by Cheung (1990) in determining computer programming anxiety was adapted to Turkish by the validity and reliability study by the researcher and was used as pre-test and post-test. Variance and covariance analyzes were used to determine anxiety about academic success and programming, and the results of Kruskal–Wallis test analyzes were used for analysis of performance tests. It is concluded that educational programming languages can be used by integrating both the theory and practice of the course in order to increase academic success and in-class performance and reduce anxiety about computer programming.