An empirical study of novice program comprehension in the imperative and object-oriented styles

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine whether the mental representation of object-oriented programs differs from imperative programs for novice programmers. In our study novices who had little or no previous programming experience studied and answered questions about three imperative and three object-oriented programs. The questions targeted information categories making up the program model and the domain model representations of the programs. It was found that there was a sharp contrast between the mental representations of the imperative and object-oriented programs. While the comprehension of the imperative programs was better overall than that of the object-oriented programs, the mental representations of the imperative programs focused on program-level knowledge. On the other hand, the mental representations of the objectoriented programs focused more strongly on domain-level knowledge. The results tend to support the view that language notations differ in how well they support the extraction of various kinds of information.

Novice comprehension of small programs written in the procedural and object-oriented styles

“…Pennington (1987b) found this result for expert programmers comprehending small procedural programs, while Corritore and Wiedenbeck (1991) found a similar result for novices comprehending small procedural programs. Our prior experiment comparing procedural and OO program comprehension by novices also suggested a strong program model for procedural programs (Ramalingam & Wiedenbeck, 1997). However, in the current experiment control #ow questions were answered more poorly than in that experiment.…”

“…This experiment was designed to replicate a previous experiment (Ramalingam & Wiedenbeck, 1997). The results of the previous study indicated a strong functional component to novices' mental representations of OO programs.…”

“…This use of functionally equivalent programs in the two styles addressed the methodological issue of the lack of a criterion of comparability in our previous experiment (Ramalingam & Wiedenbeck, 1997).…”

Teaching Students to Program Using Visual Environments: Impetus for a Faulty Mental Model?

“…Three measures were conducted for student assessment: Computer Programming Self-Efficacy Scale [16], a time on task assessment, and a usability survey.…”

An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming

“…There is as much literature discussing the value of teaching within one paradigm or another as literature discussing language choice (for example [7,8,9,10,12,19,24]). Certainly, if such an approach is necessary, then the results presented here must be qualified according to the instructor's choice of paradigm.…”