research-article

Novice Programmers' Reasoning about Reversing Conditional Statements

Authors:

Cruz Izu,

Claudio Mirolo,

Amali WeerasingheAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Pages 646 - 651

https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159499

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

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Abstract

We want undergraduate students to develop higher-order thinking skills that enable them to master program behaviour. Nonetheless, many students of both introductory and advanced programming courses appear to struggle with the abstraction required for this purpose. In particular, a recent think-aloud study showed a group of students were able to reason about and reverse the effect of assignments and vector updates, but most of them failed when asked to reverse a seemingly simple conditional statement.

We have extended that study by assigning a similar task to two cohorts of novice programmers as part of their final exam paper. Students' answers, including code and short explanations, have been analysed through the lens of the SOLO taxonomy: 28% of the solutions were correct (classified as relational); an additional 23% were partially correct but failed to identify the overlap between the two paths of the conditional statement (classified as multistructural). Furthermore, the concept of reversibility and related "low-ceiling" tasks, such as the one discussed in this study, could be useful resources for educators to assess and develop students' understanding of program behaviour.

References

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J. B. Biggs and K. F Collis. 1982. Evaluating the quality of learning: The SOLO taxonomy. Academic Press, New York, NY, USA.

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R. Bornat, S. Dehnadi, and D. Barton. 2012. Observing Mental Models in Novice Programmers. In Proc. 24th Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group. Article bibinfoarticleno6, bibinfonumpages7 pages.

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Ibrahim Cetin. 2015. Student's Understanding of Loops and Nested Loops in Computer Programming: An APOS Theory Perspective. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Vol. 15, 2 (Feb. 2015), 155--170. 1145/2591708.2591712

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Jacqueline Whalley, Tony Clear, Phil Robbins, and Errol Thompson. 2011. Salient elements in novice solutions to code writing problems. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology Series Vol. 114 (2011), 37--45. showISSN14451336

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Kather PDuran RVahrenhold J(2021)Through (Tracking) Their Eyes: Abstraction and Complexity in Program ComprehensionACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/348017122:2(1-33)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3480171
Mirolo CIzu CScapin E(2020)High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibilityProceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3421590.3421603(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3421590.3421603
Izu CSchulte CAggarwal ACutts QDuran RGutica MHeinemann BKraemer ELonati VMirolo CWeeda RRößling GGiannakos MScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers - Learning Activities and Learning TrajectoriesProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3344429.3372501(27-52)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3344429.3372501
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Novice Programmers' Reasoning about Reversing Conditional Statements
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education

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Published In

SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 2018

1174 pages

ISBN:9781450351034

DOI:10.1145/3159450

General Chairs:
Tiffany Barnes
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Daniel Garcia
University of California, Berkeley, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Elizabeth K. Hawthorne
Union County College, USA
,
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones
UNC Charlotte, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 February 2018

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SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 21 - 24, 2018

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

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Kather PDuran RVahrenhold J(2021)Through (Tracking) Their Eyes: Abstraction and Complexity in Program ComprehensionACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/348017122:2(1-33)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3480171
Mirolo CIzu CScapin E(2020)High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibilityProceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3421590.3421603(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3421590.3421603
Izu CSchulte CAggarwal ACutts QDuran RGutica MHeinemann BKraemer ELonati VMirolo CWeeda RRößling GGiannakos MScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers - Learning Activities and Learning TrajectoriesProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3344429.3372501(27-52)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3344429.3372501
Izu CSchulte CAggarwal ACutts QDuran RGutica MHeinemann BKraemer ELonati VMirolo CWeeda RScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Program ComprehensionProceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3304221.3325531(261-262)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3304221.3325531
Mirolo CIzu CScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)An Exploration of Novice Programmers' Comprehension of Conditionals in Imperative and Functional ProgrammingProceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3304221.3319746(436-442)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3304221.3319746

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