Searching for Barriers to Learning Iteration and Runtime in Computer Science

Shah, Philipp; Capovilla, Dino; Hubwieser, Peter

doi:10.1145/2818314.2818326

Cited by 39 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…They reported that "for almost all of the concepts, both groups perform equally well, but students in the adolescent treatment group perform significantly worse when learning the concepts of loop structures and repetition." Other works also reported high school student's difficulties comprehending loop updates [31] and zero-iteration loops [16]. To develop better comprehension, Smetsers-Weeda and Smetsers [34] proposed the use of flowcharts in combination with reflection and evaluation "in order to ensure that students learn from their mistakes through an iterative think-act process".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibility

Mirolo

Izu

Scapin

2020

Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education

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High-school students specialising in computing fields need to develop the abstraction skills required to understand and create programs. Novices' difficulties at high-school level, ranging from mastery of the "notional machine" to appreciation of a program's purpose, have not yet been investigated as extensively as at undergraduate level.This work explores high-school students' code comprehension by asking to reason about reversing conditional and iteration constructs. A sample of 205 K11-13 students from different institutions were asked to engage in a set of "reversibility tasklets". For each code fragment, they need to identify if its computation is reversible and either provide the code to reverse or an example of a value that cannot be reversed. For 4 such items, after extracting the recurrent patterns in students' answers, we have carried out an analysis within the framework of the SOLO taxonomy. Overall, 74% of answers correctly identified if the code was reversible but only 42% could provide the full explanation/code. The rate of relational answers varies from 51% down to 21%, the poorest performance arising for a small array-processing loop (and although 65% of the subjects had correctly identified the loop as reversible).The instruction level did not have a strong impact on performance, indicating such tasks are suitable for K11, when the basic flow-control constructs are usually introduced. In particular, the reversibility concept could be a useful pedagogical instrument both to assess and to help develop students' program comprehension.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%