The Impact of Connecting Worked Examples and Completion Problems for Introductory Programming Practice

Worked examples have consistently demonstrated their value in education, serving as the model solutions for solving specific problem types. Past studies indicate that combining worked examples with practice problems is more effective than providing either problems or examples in isolation. Despite these findings, the exploration of the effects of grouping worked examples and problems for programming practice is limited, especially in learning environments designed for practice. This paper compares two content organization approaches in a practice system. The first one is explicitly connecting worked examples and completion problems, allowing students to access them in smaller bundles. The other one is delivering the same set of activities separately but keeping an implicit connection by grouping them under a topic. We examined the effects of these two approaches on student engagement and performance in a semester-long classroom experiment conducted in a CS1 programming course. The results indicate that explicitly connecting worked examples and completion problems increased engagement with the completion problems and supported problem-solving performance by leading to higher success rates and persistence.