Transformative and Troublesome? Students' and Professional Programmers' Perspectives on Difficult Concepts in Programming

Abstract

Programming skills are an increasingly desirable asset across disciplines; however, learning to program continues to be dicult for many students. To improve pedagogy, we need to beer understand the concepts that students nd dicult and which have the biggest impact on their learning. reshold-concept theory provides a potential lens on student learning, focusing on concepts that are troublesome and transformative. However, there is still a lack of consensus as to what the most relevant threshold concepts in programming are. e challenges involved are related to concept granularity and to evidencing some of the properties expected of threshold concepts. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study aiming to address some of these concerns. e study involved focus groups with undergraduate students of dierent year groups as well as professional soware developers so as to gain insights into how perspectives on concepts change over time. Four concepts emerged from the data, where the majority of participants agreed on their troublesome nature-including abstract classes and data structures. Some of these concepts are considered transformative, too, but the evidence base is weaker. However, even though these concepts may not be considered transformative in the 'big' sense of threshold concept theory, we argue the 'so' transformative eect of such concepts means they can provide important guidance for pedagogy and the design of programming courses. Further analysis of the data identied additional concepts that may hinder rather than help the learning of these threshold concepts, which we have called 'accidental complexities'. We conclude the paper with a critique of the use of threshold concepts as a lens for studying students' learning of programming.

Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework

“…Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016) To assist consideration of the nature of the threshold being crossed, we identified a subset of the eight widely-discussed characteristics of TCs which might best inform our discussion. The transformative quality of TCs has been described as their utmost indicator (Sanders and McCartney 2016;Yeomans, ZsChaler, and Coate 2019), and accords with our premise that some process of transformation must occur in the process of becoming an open educator. Furthermore, previous research has highlighted the inherent difficulty involved in processing or internalising a TC, which indicates that it represents troublesome knowledge (Yeomans, ZsChaler, and Coate 2019); this may go some way to explain why only some educators undergo this shift.…”

“…The transformative quality of TCs has been described as their utmost indicator (Sanders and McCartney 2016;Yeomans, ZsChaler, and Coate 2019), and accords with our premise that some process of transformation must occur in the process of becoming an open educator. Furthermore, previous research has highlighted the inherent difficulty involved in processing or internalising a TC, which indicates that it represents troublesome knowledge (Yeomans, ZsChaler, and Coate 2019); this may go some way to explain why only some educators undergo this shift. We also contend that exploration of the liminal characteristic of TCs is fundamental to an understanding of how identity alters in the process of threshold crossing and the contested status that is experienced when one feels 'betwixt and between' available identities (Turner 1979).…”

Toward Predicting Success and Failure in CS2

“…The responses to this question were predictably diffuse, but students did agree on some issues. Linked lists and its emphasis on pointers and class/object definition are challenging topics, reinforcing findings in Simon et al [24] and Yeomans et al [31]. Responses discussing the Linked List and Class/Objects topics often reference challenges in translating the concepts into code.…”

Pairing-Based Approach to Support Understanding of Object-Oriented Concepts and Programming

“…Bosnić et al [10] studied the impact of the distributed software development course among software engineering fresh graduates. Finally, Yeomans et al [11] compared the different perspectives between students and professional programmers on challenging concepts in programming. These works contribute to diverse aspects of supporting computing students when mastering programming skills.…”