Web Application Development Achievement: Clarifying the Relationship Between Visual GUI Design and Textual Programming

To develop web applications, the design of a graphical user interface (GUI design) is combined with textual programming. As these two practices are inevitably interconnected, the relationship between students’ achievements in GUI design and textual programming should be a positive one. In order to improve instruction in web application development, this relationship should be clarified. This clarification is relevant because different kinds of GUI controls are available (e.g., standard input/output controls, data validation controls). These controls differ with respect to the nature and complexity of their properties, which need to be specified, possibly resulting in positive relationships of different strengths. To this end, this study used a sample of 74 second-year undergraduate students, who developed simple web applications through combining visual GUI design in the ASP.NET language and textual programming in C# language. By considering the students’ web development achievements regarding this design and that programming, a positive relationship between them was found. In one group of 36 students, whose achievements in a 3-variable task were modest (almost 65% correct), this relationship was very strong (Spearman’s \(rho = 0.868, df = 34, p < 0.01\)); the correlation between visual GUI design using validation controls and textual programming was also very strong (\(r_{S} = 0.872, df = 34, p < 0.01\)), whereas the correlation between visual GUI design using standard controls and textual programming was moderate (\(r_{S} = 0.555, df = 34, p < 0.01\)). In the other group of 38 students, whose achievements in a 5-variable task were quite good (about 90% correct), this relationship was moderate (\(r_{S} = 0.564, df = 36, p < 0.01\)); the correlation between visual GUI design using standard controls and textual programming was also moderate (\(r_{S} = 0.540, df = 36, p < 0.01\)), whereas the correlation between visual GUI design using validation controls and textual programming was rather weak (\(r_{S} = 0.348, df = 36, p < 0.05\)). Suggestions for practice and research are included.