Recursively speaking: analyzing students' discourse of recursive phenomena

Recursion is a powerful concept, appearing in almost every introductory course in computer-science (CS). CS educators and educational researchers often refer to difficulties in learning recursion, and suggest methods for teaching recursion. However, the research literature barely addresses the unique ways in which students relate to this interdisciplinary concept and the particular learners' language concerning recursive phenomena. The gap is most apparent when seen through a constructivist lens, where the students' prior knowledge and idiosyncratic conceptions should be referred to and reflected upon in order to serve as a basis for further knowledge construction. This paper reports on a study in which a collaborative classification of several recursive phenomena is used to facilitate the construction of recursion. The students' discourse was analyzed, as a step toward understanding the students' ways of speaking recursively. Preliminary results indicate some basic aspects of recursion in the student discourse, although the students apparently talk a very different language from that of the experts, as used by books and teachers.