Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

By Raymond Lister, C. Fidge, Donna Teague. 2009

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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In Computer Science Applications

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Comparing Code Explanations Created by Students and Large Language Models (2023, background): “Prior computing education research suggests that proficiency at explaining code develops for novices after lower-level code tracing skills and is a prerequisite for higher-level code writing skills [24, 39].”
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): “Program comprehension is important for writing and debugging code (Lister et al. 2009; Lopez et al. 2008; McCauley et al. 2008).”
Automatic Generation of Programming Exercises and Code Explanations Using Large Language Models (2022, background): “The relationship between a student’s ability to explain code, and related skills such as code tracing and code writing, have been the focus of much prior research in computing education [51, 52, 75, 83].”
Ability to 'explain in plain english' linked to proficiency in computer-based programming (2012, background): “There are five SOLO reasoning categories, roughly based on Piaget s stages of development, which describe how students understand problems in increasingly abstract ways.”
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].”
Studying the effect of AI Code Generators on Supporting Novice Learners in Introductory Programming (2023, background): “Prior work in introductory programming has shown that code-reading and tracing skills are essential to problem-solving activities including code-writing [48, 54, 55].”