Is iteration really easier to learn than recursion for CS1 students?

Abstract

There is general consensus that recursion is difficult to learn, which may be meant to imply that novice students are more at ease with iteration --- probably a widespread perception of students themselves. However, three years of investigation in a context where recursion is introduced earlier than iteration, as well as control experiments for a standard imperative-first introduction to programming, have provided no evidence that students make more progress with iteration than they do with recursion. More specifically, by means of a pair of questionnaires devised for this purpose, two research questions have been addressed. First, do the students who learned recursion before iteration actually exhibit a stronger ability to deal with the latter? Second, do the students of the imperative-first path master iteration better than those of the recursion-earlier path

Three views on motivation and programming

“…Gunion and her collaborators studied elementary and middleschool students in an extracurricular program focusing on recursion and found that the activities improved student interest in computing [4]. A study focusing on whether to teach iteration or recursion first noted that the motivation levels of the two populations had differed, making definitive conclusions difficult to draw [7]. Researchers involved in the Game2Learn project directly considered motivation in creating and measuring the impact of a game for learning recursion [3].…”

Iteration vs Recursion in Introduction to Programming Classes: An Empirical Study

“…Generally, students have difficulties with recursion [3,6,7], especially identifying base cases [3] and thus some researchers argue that "it is sensible pedagogical practice to base understanding of recursive flow of control on understanding iterative flow of control" [6]. Some other researchers, though, reach the opposite results [11] and one study even concluded that students favor recursion when doing a task such as searching a linked list for a given value and comprehend better recursive code for this and a similar task [1] although the latter was in turn contradicted by a similar more recent study [9].…”

Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers - Learning Activities and Learning Trajectories

“…Novice understanding of programs has been explored from a variety of perspectives, among them: interpreting students' ways of classifying code fragments based on perceived similarities and differences [365]; categorizing novices' mental models of the notional machine underlying imperative [33] and recursive [307] computations, as well as comparing students' mastery of recursion vs. iteration [237]; assessing the understanding of conditionals, loops and nested loops [155,48]; analyzing the relations between students' performance and their annotations in the exam papers [223], and finally comparing block versus textual representations of programs [385].…”