Students Struggle to Explain Their Own Program Code
By Teemu Lehtinen, Aleksi Lukkarinen, Lassi Haaranen. 2021
33 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open course in introductory programming as a part of the digital learning material. We make inductive content analysis to research the open-ended text answers we collected. One third of the students struggled to explain their own program code. This estimates possible occurrences of fragile learning at the moment when a student seemingly succeeds in a program writing exercise. Furthermore, we examine correlations between the correctness of the answers with other learning data. Our results indicate that answering properly aligned QLCs correctly has stronger correlation with student success and retention than merely submitting a correct program. Additionally, we present observations on learning event-driven programming to explore QLCs' potential in identifying students' thinking process.
Subfields: Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science & Psychology
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Human-Computer Interaction
- Juho Leinonen
- Sami Sarsa
- Arto Hellas
- Paul Denny
- Lassi Haaranen
- Teemu Lehtinen
- Seth Bernstein
- Andrew Tran
In Cognitive Science & Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Comparing Code Explanations Created by Students and Large Language Models (2023, background): “However, students struggle to explain their own code and the ability to explain code is a difficult skill to develop [20, 38].”
- Automated Questionnaires About Students’ JavaScript Programs: Towards Gauging Novice Programming Processes (2023, methodology): “This supports the previous finding of correlation between success in manually prepared QLCs and course retention [16]. process that included mostly copy-pasted code (i.e., likely written in another editor) and were rejected from qualitative analysis.”