TOWARDS THE USE OF A NOVEL METHOD: The First Experiences on Measuring the Cognitive Load of Learned Programming Skills

Teaching object-oriented programming (OOP) is a difficult task, especially to the
beginners. First-time learners also find it difficult to understand. Although there is a
considerable amount of study on the cognitive dimension, a few study points out its
physiological meaning. Moreover, it has been suggested that neuroscientific studies and
methods can enable educational researchers gain an insight into brain and cognitive
processes as well. Therefore, this experimental study explored the previously learned
OOP skills in terms of cognitive load. By using the functional near-infrared spectroscopy
(fNIRS) method, we measured the cognitive load of participants when executing OOP
tasks. The average oxygenation changes in prefrontal cortex of the brain represented
their total cognitive response to a set of OOP tasks. There were two research questions
investigated by this study. The first research question explored whether the average
oxygenation changed according to the participants’ academic achievements and task
completion status. The second research question was for identifying the instant changes
in the oxygenations to find out which programming tasks were more contributing to the
oxygenation. Later, we compared the findings with experts’ judgments. We observed that
the fNIRS system was an effective and promising technology for monitoring cognitive
tasks both in classrooms and in experimental environments.