How Teachers Would Help Students to Improve Their Code

Abstract

Code quality has been receiving less attention than program correctness in both the practice of and research into programming education. Writing poor quality code might be a sign of carelessness, or not fully understanding programming concepts and language constructs. Teachers play an important role in addressing quality issues, and encouraging students to write better code as early as possible.In this paper we explore to what extent teachers address code quality in their teaching, which code quality issues they observe and how they would help novices to improve their code. We presented student code of low quality to 30 experienced teachers and asked them which hints they would give and how the student should improve the code step by step. We compare these hints to the output of professional code quality tools.Although most teachers gave similar hints on reducing the algorithmic complexity and removing clutter, they gave varying subsets of hints on other topics. We found a large variety in how they would solve issues in code. We noticed that professional code quality tools do not point out the algorithmic complexity topics that teachers mention. Finally, we give some general guidelines on how to approach code improvement.

Student Refactoring Behaviour in a Programming Tutor

“…The hints the system gives are based on rules, derived from teacher suggestions for a set of imperfect student programs, collected in our earlier study that investigated how teachers would give feedback on improving code [18]. Other rules are based on other studies [9,36], a subset of rules from professional static analysis tools considered suitable for novices, and equality rules from arithmetic and logic.…”

“…The system focuses on method-level refactorings, such as rewriting a complex expression, removing unneeded code, and replacing a language construct by a more suitable alternative. The functionality of the tutoring system is based on input from teachers and how they would want students to rewrite their code, which we investigated in an earlier study [18]. The system offers refactoring exercises: it is the student's task to rewrite functionally correct code.…”

Hyperstyle

“…Poor coding style may result in writing incomprehensible code that is difficult to maintain and test [25]. Creating code quality awareness is an important step in preparing programming students to work as professional developers [21,28,29]. However, many students do not pay enough attention to code quality, since the main goal for them is to submit a solution that passes all the tests [28].…”

“…However, many students do not pay enough attention to code quality, since the main goal for them is to submit a solution that passes all the tests [28]. They rarely research more complex solutions or best practices [28,29] and may make the same mistakes over again. Therefore, learners may need an incentive to improve their coding style [28].…”

Teaching the Culture of Quality from the Ground Up: Novice-tailored Quality Improvement for Scratch Programmers

“…The CS Education research literature has established the importance of teaching software quality as part of the CS curriculum 1,2,3,4 . However, it remains subject to considerable debate whether the topic of software quality is appropriate for introductory learners.…”