The many ways of the BRACElet project (original) (raw)
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BRACElet is a multi-institutional multi-national research study of how novice programmers comprehend and write computer programs. This paper reviews the first action research cycle of the BRACElet project and, in the process, charts a path for the upcoming second cycle. The project remains close to educational practice, with much of the data being either data collected directly from exams sat by novices, or data from think-out-loud protocols where the task undertaken by a novice or an expert is modelled on an exam question. The ...
9th Computer Science Education Research Conference (CSERC '20), 2020
This paper is a companion to my keynote address at the 9th Computer Science Education Research Conference (CSERC '20). I review the research that led to my three stage neo-Piagetian model of how novices understand code. Code tracing is the key. In the first stage, the novice cannot trace code. In the second stage, the novice has mastered tracing, but, crucially, that is the only skill they have mastered. It is only when novices reach the third stage that they begin to reason about code in a more general, abstract way. The principal failure of traditional approaches to teaching programming has been the assumption that the novices begin at the third stage.
Conceptual Understandings of Novice Programmers
Australian Computers in Education Conference, 2014
The need for computer users to have a conceptual, compared with surface-level, understanding of computers has been argued by various authors over many years. Conceptual difficulties are not, of course, specific to the computer programming domain, and indeed are often the focus of Science education practices. This investigation concerns the understanding of secondary school students who are novice users of the Python programming language. A series of different tasks were developed to probe their understandings of relevant programming concepts. As Science education in recent times has often favoured probes of understanding and student-centred representational approaches, we argue for creative teaching and learning strategies which make visible and explicit their understandings, making them open to clarification and elaboration. In short, we contend that there is opportunity for creative pedagogy by bringing some Science education practices into ‘Computer Science’, thus helping students resolve misconceptions and identifying pedagogical approaches which may have unwittingly reinforced such views.
Mired in the Web: Vignettes from Charlotte and Other Novice Programmers
Ahadi and Lister (2013) found that many of their introductory programming students had fallen behind as early as week 3 of semester, and those students often then stayed behind. Our later work (Ahadi, Lister and Teague 2014) supported that finding, for students at another institution. In this paper, we go one step further than those earlier studies by observing a number of students as they complete programming tasks while thinking aloud. We describe the types of inconsistencies students manifest, which are often not evident on analysis of conventional written tests. We again interpret our findings using neo-Piagetian theory. We conclude with some thoughts on the pedagogical implications of our research results.
1984
The five papers in this symposium contribute to a dialog on the aims and methods of computer education, and indicate directions future research must take if necessary information is to be available to make informed decisions about the use of computers in schools. The first two papers address the question of what is required for a student to become a reasonably proficient programmer. The first-"Mapping the Cognitive Demands of Learning to Program" (D. Midian Kurland, Katherine Clement, Ronald Mawby, and Roy D. Pea)-reports a study of high school programming novices who participated in an intensive summer programming course. The second paper-"The Development of Programming Expertise in Adults and Children" (D. Midian Kurland, Ronald Mawby, and Nancy Cahir)-examines how expert programmers acquired their skill, with attention to the amount of time invested and the type of resources available when they were learning to program. The last three papers look beyond programming to the issue of transfer. The third-"Issues and Problems in Studying Transfer Effects of Programming" (Kate Ehrlich, Valerie Abbott, William Salter, and Elliot Soloway)-examines whether learning to program helps students solve problems in other related intellectual domains. The fourth-"What Will It Take to Learn Thinking Skills Through Computer Programming?" (Roy D. Pea)-discusses research on the transfer of high level thinking skills from programming. The final paper-"Making Programming Instruction Cognitively Demanding: An Intervention Study" (John Dalby, Francois. Tourniaire, and Marcia C. Linn)-describes a study in which a curriculum was designed explicitly to make programming more cognitively challenging. A concluding commentary by Jan Hawkins discusses the issues raised in the papers and offers thoughts on current and future directions for research in this field.
A study of the difficulties of novice programmers
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 2005
Programming is related to several fields of technology, and many university students are studying the basics of it. Unfortunately, they often face difficulties already on the basic courses. This work studies the difficulties in learning programming in order to support developing learning materials for basic programming courses. The difficulties have to be recognized to be able to aid learning and teaching in an effective way.
Novice Programmers in the First Three Semesters: Gaining a Better Understanding of the Problem
2012
The initial aim of this project was to carry out a longitudinal study across three semesters of students' performance on in-class test questions and on specific exam questions. The reason for carrying out such a longitudinal study was to see at what stage of their studies students' were able to demonstrate understanding of various concepts required for learning computer programming.
ACM Sigcse Bulletin, 2009
In New Zealand and Australia, the BRACElet project has been investigating students' acquisition of programming skills in introductory programming courses. The project has explored students' skills in basic syntax, tracing code, understanding code, and writing code, seeking to establish the relationships between these skills. This ITiCSE working group report presents the most recent step in the BRACElet project, which includes replication of earlier analysis using a far broader pool of naturally occurring data, refinement of the SOLO taxonomy in code-explaining questions, extension of the taxonomy to code-writing questions, extension of some earlier studies on students' 'doodling' while answering exam questions, and exploration of a further theoretical basis for work that until now has been primarily empirical.
A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 2004
A study by a ITiCSE 2001 working group ("the McCracken Group") established that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. A popular explanation for this incapacity is that the students lack the ability to problem-solve. That is, they lack the ability to take a problem description, decompose it into sub-problems and implement them, then assemble the pieces into a complete solution. An alternative explanation is that many students have a fragile grasp of both basic programming principles and the ability to systematically carry out routine programming tasks, such as tracing (or "desk checking") through code. This ITiCSE 2004 working group studied the alternative explanation, by testing students from seven countries, in two ways. First, students were tested on their ability to predict the outcome of executing a short piece of code. Second, students were tested on their ability, when given the desired function of short p...