A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming Bugs

Abstract

When teachers, researchers, and students describe productively responding to moments of failure in the learning process, what might this mean? Blending prior theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between failure and learning, and empirical results from four data sets that are part of a larger design-based research project, we investigate the heterogeneous processes teachers and students value and pursue following moments in which computer bugs thwart their immediate progress on an activity. These include: (1) resolving moments of failure; (2) avoiding recurring failures; (3) preparing for novel failures; (4) engaging with authority; and (5) calibrating confidence/ efficacy. We investigate these processes taking into account the personal, social, and material context in which students and teachers collaborate when encountering broken computer programs, in addition to teachers' planning efforts and the community's reflections on past debugging experiences. We argue that moments of failure are not simply occasions for seeking resolutions. They are points of departure for decisions about how and what to foreground and interleave among a range of valued processes. Overall, this study aims to support research on the heterogeneous processes that shape how students new to a discipline such as computer programming respond to getting stuck.Learning trajectories are commonly punctuated by stretches of difficulty. In the research literature, they are variably described as impasses (VanLehn, 1988), breakdowns (Koschmann et al., 1998), snags (Lave et al., 1984, and/or failures (Kapur, 2008), and they can drive long-term learning (Kapur, 2016;Sinha & Kapur, 2021). Acknowledging this potential, in this paper, we investigate the heterogeneous processes teachers and students value and pursue following moments in which their immediate progress on an activity is thwarted by friction, problems, obstacles, etc. To lead with a student's perspective on these processes, we highlight sixth grade Zoa's 1 reflections on debugging during a two-week Summer computer science (CS) workshop. Zoa's reflections during and following coding sessions, including in the art piece featured below (see Figure 1), cover substantial ground. Across the two weeks, instead of attending to a single process following moments of failure, Zoa comments on self-efficacy ("I'm slowly dying. I got this," "doubted myself"), strategies for debugging ("compared my work," "experiment with my code"), collaboration ("my

Welcome to the oops club!: Varied patterns of mistake responses in a veteran teacher’s classroom

“…In other moments, I saw her invite a child who made an error to promptly ask for assistance from a peer, while at times, she would just provide the right answer herself. These sorts of variations mirror work by DeLiema et al (2023), who observed that teachers employed multiple approaches when learners made mistakes, at times electing to give students the right answer and at other occasions giving them strategies to correct themselves.…”

“…This wide variation in strategies within a single classroom illustrates this teacher's adaptiveness as she strives to individualize her responses based on the children's performance, learning needs, and behaviors-often an explicit goal of Kindergarten teachers (Donaldson, 2019a). Instructional variations like these have been illustrated in other work (e.g., Bray, 2011;Donaldson, 2021;DeLiema et al, 2023) but are not always the main focus of research on feedback and learning from mistakes.…”

“…Feasibly, these dimensions could vary by teacher, or even within the same teacher across different circumstances. As a complement to the range of mistake responses demonstrated by students, teachers provide a host of different instructional supports as learners navigate intellectual challenges (Flood et al, 2022;DeLiema et al, 2023). The way a teacher structures a classroom environment has the potential to increase children's willingness to admit their mistakes during the learning process (Porter et al, 2022), better positioning them to learn from previous errors and accompanying feedback.…”