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Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

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Published:06 July 2009Publication History
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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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  1. Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
        ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 41, Issue 3
        ITiCSE '09
        September 2009
        403 pages
        ISSN:0097-8418
        DOI:10.1145/1595496
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          ITiCSE '09: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
          July 2009
          428 pages
          ISBN:9781605583815
          DOI:10.1145/1562877

        Copyright © 2009 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

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        • Published: 6 July 2009

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