Conditions of Learning in Novice Programmers

TLDR

Programming proficiency varies among young learners under typical instruction. The study seeks to design instruction that promotes better learning practices to help students acquire programming skills and foster learning‑to‑learn. Students show diverse learning patterns, frequently disengaging, neglecting code review, tinkering haphazardly, and struggling to decompose problems, which hampers effective learning and leads them to devise plans beyond what is taught.

Abstract

Under normal instructional circumstances, some youngsters learn programming in BASIC or LOGO much better than others. Clinical investigations of novice programmers suggest that this happens in part because different students bring different patterns of learning to the programming context. Many students disengage from the task whenever trouble occurs, neglect to track closely what their programs do by reading back the code as they write it, try to repair buggy programs by haphazardly tinkering with the code, or have difficulty breaking problems down into parts suitable for separate chunks of code. Such problems interfere with students making the best of their own learning capabilities: students often invent programming plans that go beyond what they have been taught directly. Instruction designed to foster better learning practices could help students to acquire a repertoire of programming skills, perhaps with spinoffs having to do with “learning to learn.”