Characterizing novice difficulties in program composition and aligning tasks for formative assessment

Abstract

This study reports on an in-depth research into difficulties endured throughout disparate stages of students’ programming development, pursue a practical method to determine a student’s development stage, and propose specific interventions to remediate these difficulties tuned to each stage.

The perceived difficulties which novice programmers endure during code composition, combining multi-faceted data from observations to students’ perceptions via interviews, think aloud, task ranking, and task rating were collected in a previous study. These have been anonymized and are publicly available in the DANS EASY archive: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xnn-x5p3. This data was further analyzed for performance (correctness, completeness, SOLO, Neo-Piagetian stages) as well as construct (combinations) used.

This data set includes the new data collected from the second analysis of the data from the previous study, as well as (R) scripts used for quantitative analysis.