Journal
SIGCSE'18: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 49TH ACM TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
Volume -, Issue -, Pages 423-428Publisher
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
DOI: 10.1145/3159450.3159530
Keywords
Assessment; CS1; Computer Science Education; Code Tracing; Code Writing; Exam Questions
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Much work has been done on the achievement gap between code tracing and code writing in CS1 students. The generally accepted explanation for this gap is that tracing and writing form separate steps in a learning scaffolding; students must first learn to trace code before they can be expected to write code. The expectation is that once students have mastered these skills, future grades will be driven by their ability to understand the deeper learning concepts, and so the gap between tracing and writing should disappear. In this paper, we detail and evaluate a study on 384 CS2 students to evaluate whether a tracing-writing gap still exists, and assess whether anything can be deduced about students who continue to exhibit such a gap. We find that not only does the gap seem to have closed by CS2, students are equally likely to show a reverse gap in the writing-tracing direction. However, further analysis shows a strong correlation between students who do continue to have a gap (in either direction) and poor overall performance in the course.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available