A closer look at tracing, explaining and code writing skills in the novice programmer

Venables, Anne; Tan, Grace; Lister, Raymond

doi:10.1145/1584322.1584336

Cited by 145 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Research often reports that learners struggle with programming skills such as tracing [3,6] and understanding a model of the machine [2,9]. Having recognized this issue, other researchers [7,20] highlight the need for a defined hierarchy of programming skills. One study [16] attempted to provide such a hierarchy for objectoriented programming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting computational thinking with programming

Selby

2012

Proceedings of the 7th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education

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The term computational thinking has received some discussion in the field of computer science education research. The term is defined as the concept of thinking about problems in a way that can be implemented in a computing device. Of course, after having thought about a problem using computational thinking skills, the next step should be to use programming skills to implement the solution. This work in progress is exploring ways in which programming can be employed as a tool to teach computational thinking and problem solving. Data is collected from teachers, academics, and professionals from various industries. They are purposively selected because of their knowledge of or interest in the topics of problem solving, computational thinking, and the teaching of programming. This data is analyzed within the paradigm of the grounded theory approach. The results of an initial analysis imply an ordering of complexity associated with computational thinking skills, imply connections between computational thinking skills and programming activities, and imply a relationship between computational thinking skills and other taxonomies of learning.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting computational thinking with programming

Selby

2012

Proceedings of the 7th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education

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“…In the intermediate level is the ability to accurately read and trace code. At the top of the hierarchy is the ability to write non-trivial and correct code using programming constructs (Lopez et al, 2008;Sheard et al, 2008;Venables, Tan, & Lister, 2009). With this hierarchy in mind, each iteration of the BRACElet project specifies that examinations should comprise at least one instance of each of the three components detailed below:…”

Section: The Bracelet Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, our work supports the BRACElet notion of a hierarchical development of skills in learning to program. For a more detailed description of the analysis, see Venables et al (2009).…”

Section: Wearing the Assessment Bracelet: The Victoria University Expmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wearing the Assessment ‘BRACElet’

Tan

Venables

2010

JITE:IIP

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Executive SummaryThere exists a wealth of computing education literature devoted to interventions designed to overcome novices' difficulties in learning to write computer programs. However, various studies have shown that the majority of students at the end of a semester of instruction are still unable to write a simple computer program, despite the best efforts of their teachers (Lister et al., 2004;McCracken et al., 2001;Soloway, Bonar, & Ehrlich, 1983). In an effort to address this problem, a workshop titled Building Research in Australasian Computing Education (BRACE) was convened in 2004. BRACE brought together academics interested in learning and applying the techniques and methodologies of action research to the problem of poor student code-writing performance. At this workshop, and at those that followed, participants agreed to use end-ofsemester assessments to try to pinpoint the key steps and difficulties beginners faced in learning introductory programming. Subsequently the group, which has come to be known as the BRACElet project, has continued to meet twice a year in an effort to better understanding of how students learn and grasp various programming concepts.Over the past five years, the BRACElet project has fostered a multi-institutional community of practice amongst academics who teach novice computer programming. For participants, the BRACElet project provides the benefits of external moderation, quality assurance, and benchmarking of examinations. At a BRACElet meeting, attendees decide upon a small common set of question types for use within their own local examinations; it is the subsequent analysis and discussion of locally collected data from various institutions that comprises the BRACElet project's iterative series of action research. By examining across institutions common difficulties students may have on various question types, such as reading, tracing, and coding, the BRACElet project attempts to build theory on how learners acquire programming knowledge.In 2008, academics from Victoria University joined the BRACElet group. After modifying our end of semester examination to contain the BRACElet core question types, the examination was run and data was collected across the cohort of 32 students. The analysis treated student performance on code writing questions as the dependent variable and looked at the relationship between code writing questions and non-code writing questions. Overall, our study found that the combination of tracing and explaining questions, more so than each skill independently correlates highly to code writing skills supporting the

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“…Following this line of research, it was claimed that the skills constitute a hierarchy from Basics to Writing in [2] and Explain is an important precursor to acquire Writing. It was also reported that the result varies across universities in [3] and how they are related is not yet clear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Relationship between programming concepts underlying programming skills

Yamamoto

Sekiya

Yamaguchi

2011

2011 International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training

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We investigated the relationship between programming skills and that of programming concepts in the introductory programming course in this paper. We introduced Modification and Programming skills from other existing skills. From the results of the midterm and final exams of our course, we got the scores in the skills, and from them we estimated the ability in concepts. By correlation, contingency, and covariance of the result of examinations, we found out that Modification and Programming are different from Tracing. We found things about concepts too, that some concepts are local while others are global, that their thinkings sometimes conflict, that the conditional statement is difficult than the loop, that the nested one is significantly difficult than the not nested one, and that understanding the concept of a structure is crucial for understanding the conditional structure and nested loop. We also found that the skills get more separated according to the development of abilities of students.

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A closer look at tracing, explaining and code writing skills in the novice programmer

Cited by 145 publications

References 7 publications

Promoting computational thinking with programming

Promoting computational thinking with programming

Wearing the Assessment ‘BRACElet’

Relationship between programming concepts underlying programming skills

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