Not seeing the forest for the trees: novice programmers and the SOLO taxonomy

By Raymond Lister, B. Simon, Errol Thompson, Jacqueline L. Whalley, Christine Prasad. Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 2006

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15c1977bbf50ce6b6c48eab357442e5337137126

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Citations in the corpus

Automated Questionnaires About Students’ JavaScript Programs: Towards Gauging Novice Programming Processes (2023, background): “Experts approach solving programming problems differently from novices (e.g. [21]).”
Automatic Generation of Programming Exercises and Code Explanations Using Large Language Models (2022, background): “the step-by-step explanation of code, as it aligns with the multistructural level of the SOLO taxonomy and is often produced by students when prompted to explain code [52].”
All syntax errors are not equal (2012, background): “In the domain of code comprehension, Lister et al. [8] applied the SOLO taxonomy to describe how novice programmers manifest their understanding of code.”
Learning computer science concepts with scratch (2010, methodology): “Two important methods are the Bloom taxonomy, in its original [5] or its revised form [1] (used for example in [29]) and the SOLO taxonomy [4] (used for example in [19]).”
Students’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming (2017, background): “…strategic knowledge because of their fragile syntactic and conceptual knowledge of programming (Clancy and Linn 1999; Lister et al 2004; Lister et al 2006; Soloway 1986), the knowledge-as-elements perspective may even help to guide the handling of students’ difficulties in strategic…”
Explaining program code: giving students the answer helps - but only just (2011, methodology): “…would be the question: What is the purpose or outcome of the following piece of code? x = a1; a1 = a2; a2 = x; The BRACElet project has conducted much research on the inclusion of code-explaining questions in programming exams and their analysis according to the SOLO taxonomy [2, 9, 15, 22].”
Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming (2009, background): “In a follow up to that study, Lister et al. (2006) found that when the same “explain in plain English” question was given to academics, they almost always offered a summary of the overall computation performed by the code, not a line–by–line description.”
Going SOLO to assess novice programmers (2008, methodology): “It builds on previous work of Lister et al. (2006) and addresses some of the criticisms of that work.”
Developing a computer science-specific learning taxonomy (2007, methodology): “[42] report on the authors use of the SOLO taxonomy to describe differences in the way students and educators solve small code reading exercises.”