Abstract
This paper reports on a replication of earlier studies into a possible hierarchy of programming skills. In this study, the students from whom data was collected were at a university that had not provided data for earlier studies. Also, the students were taught the programming language "Python", which had not been used in earlier studies. Thus this study serves as a test of whether the findings in the earlier studies were specific to certain institutions, student cohorts, and programming languages. Also, we used a non-parametric approach to the analysis, rather than the linear approach of earlier studies. Our results are consistent with the earlier studies. We found that students who cannot trace code usually cannot explain code, and also that students who tend to perform reasonably well at code writing tasks have also usually acquired the ability to both trace code and explain code.
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Index Terms
Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming
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A closer look at tracing, explaining and code writing skills in the novice programmer
ICER '09: Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshopThe way in which novice programmers learn to write code is of considerable interest to computing education researchers. One research approach to understanding how beginners acquire their programming abilities has been to look at student performance in ...
Relationships between reading, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming
ICER '08: Proceedings of the Fourth international Workshop on Computing Education ResearchThis study analyzed student responses to an examination, after the students had completed one semester of instruction in programming. The performance of students on code tracing tasks correlated with their performance on code writing tasks. A ...
Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming
ITiCSE '09: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science educationThis paper reports on a replication of earlier studies into a possible hierarchy of programming skills. In this study, the students from whom data was collected were at a university that had not provided data for earlier studies. Also, the students were ...







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