Relationships between reading, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

By Mike Lopez, Jacqueline L. Whalley, Phil Robbins, Raymond Lister. International Computing Education Research Workshop, 2008

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cab0a77f6ed8fc4ca1ca1ec9782dfc4d36f2254

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Citations in the corpus

Computing in the curriculum: Challenges and strategies from a teacher’s perspective (2016, background): “Reading and tracing code is also important in supporting the learning of programming (Lopez et al. 2008) and being able to do this is a pre-cursor to the problemsolving skills needed to write code (Lister et al.”
Designing for deeper learning in a blended computer science course for middle school students (2015, background): “These assessments were designed to help learners develop familiarity with code tracing – the ability to read/understand code (Bornat, 1987; Lister, Fidge, & Teague, 2009; Lopez, Whalley, Robbins, & Lister, 2008).”
Studying the effect of AI Code Generators on Supporting Novice Learners in Introductory Programming (2023, positive): “Prior work in introductory programming has shown that code-reading and tracing skills are essential to problem-solving activities including code-writing [49, 55, 57].”
Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming (2009, background): “● losses = [1, 25, 4, 9, 16] net = 100 for loss in losses: net = net - loss print net”
Explaining program code: giving students the answer helps - but only just (2011, background): “Following the explicit realization that students in a first programming course are unable to read simple programs [7], much work has been done to quantify this phenomenon in order to better understand it and to work out what it might be telling programming teachers [8, 10, 21].”
Code comprehension problems as learning events (2012, methodology): “Code comprehension questions are an often-employed method of assessment because performance on code comprehension questions often correlates with code production or code writing [2].”
Ability to 'explain in plain english' linked to proficiency in computer-based programming (2012, methodology): “Lopez et al. (2008) [5] built upon the work of Whalley et al., using stepwise regression to analyze student responses to an end of semester exam.”
Introductory programming: a systematic literature review (2018, background): “The relationship between code reading and other skills, notably code writing, has also been widely studied [383, 388, 562, 611], leading to the conclusion that code-reading skills are prerequisite for”
Students’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming (2017, background): “Students’ difficulties in strategic knowledge are highly correlated to their difficulties in syntactic knowledge and conceptual knowledge (Bayman and Mayer 1988; de Raadt 2008; Ebrahimi 1994; Lopez et al. 2008; Whalley et al. 2006; Venables et al. 2009).”
Students Struggle to Explain Their Own Program Code (2021, background): “3456322 code (executing statements by hand and keeping record of the variable values) correlates with the student’s ability of writing similar program code themselves [11, 14].”
Automated Questionnaires About Students’ JavaScript Programs: Towards Gauging Novice Programming Processes (2023, background): “While a lot of programming education focuses on program writing, researchers have increasing interest and knowledge of benefits in teaching program comprehension [11, 23], including tasks such”