A comparison of the comprehension of object-oriented and procedural programs by novice programmers

From Procedures to Objects: A Research Agenda for the Psychology of Object-Oriented Programming Education

“…Thus, novices' mental representations of the structure of large OO programs concentrates on objects and inheritance, that is, on elements that do not exist in the procedural case. Corritore and Wiedenbeck (1999) and Wiedenbeck, Ramalingam, Sarasamma, and Corritore (1999) have studied novices and experts comprehending short procedural and OO programs and found that, in the OO case, the overall function of programs is understood better than details of, for example, control flow; yet with procedural programs, comprehenders' knowledge is more balanced. These results indicate that programmers' mental representations of procedural and OO programs do differ qualitatively.…”

“…Investigations of mental representations of OO programs Wiedenbeck et al, 1999) have probed participants' knowledge with yes/no questions divided into categories determined by the researchers a priori. Such a method reveals whether participants possess knowledge in those categories but it does not reveal what other types of knowledge they might have.…”

Object-Oriented Metrics: A Review of Theory and Practice

“…Functional decomposition is believed to make procedural programs easier to understand because such programs are built upon a hierarchy in which a top-level function calls lower level functions to carry out smaller chunks of the overall task (Wiedenbeck, Ramalingam, Sarasamma, and Corritore, 1999). Hence tracing through a program to understand its global functionality is facilitated.…”

“…Widenbeck et al (Wiedenbeck et al, 1999) make a distinction between program functionality at the local level and at the global (application) level. At the local level they argue that the object-oriented paradigm' s concept of encapsulation ensures that methods are bundled together with the data on which they operate, making it easier to construct appropriate mental models and specifically to understand the individual functionality of a class.…”

Enseñando a programar: un camino directo para desarrollar el pensamiento computacional

“…A la hora de impartir una asignatura de programación de computadores y mucho más si es la primera con la que el estudiante se encuentra en su titulación, las reflexiones se centran en: ¿cómo se enseña?, ¿por dónde se empieza?, ¿qué paradigma se debe utilizar?, ¿qué lenguaje de programación se debe emplear?, ¿cómo se deben orientar los ejercicios?, y lo peor ¿cómo se imparten las clases teóricas? Acerca del paradigma de programación con el cual empezar se ha debatido reiteradamente en distintos foros educativos (García, 2001), (Gómez et al, 2001), (Wiedenbeck, 1999), (Van et al, 2003), (Robins et al, 2003). No vamos a entrar en ello, pues independientemente del paradigma en el que se basen, los estudiantes tendrán que escribir algoritmos que resuelvan determinados problemas.…”