Effect of Medium of Instruction on Programming Ability Acquired through Screencast

Students who have studied in their native language face difficulty in acquiring programming skills through English medium instruction. One solution for this is to create screen casts of live coding along with instructor explanations in the native language. In this paper we examine the impact of screen cast based self-paced learning for Hindi medium (native language) students. Our study had three groups - One group had Hindi as the medium of prior instruction, and learned programming through screen casts in Hindi. Another group, also had Hindi as the medium of prior instruction, but learned through screen casts in English. The third group had English as the medium of prior instruction, and learned through screen casts in English. We compared the performance of the three groups using a post-test having items of fact, concept and process content types. We found that Hindi medium students who studied from Hindi screen casts performed as well as English medium students who studied from English screen casts. Both groups performed better than Hindi medium students who studied from English screen casts. The effect of medium of instruction was significant for the content types of fact, process and concept.