A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

By M. McCracken, V. Almstrum, Danny Diaz, Mark J. Guzdial, Dianne Hagan, Y. Kolikant, C. Laxer, L. Thomas, I. Utting, Tadeusz Wilusz. ITiCSE-WGR '01, 2001

913 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbaddfc496cebf6dc683ed8aad2306a359aa58ce

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In Computer Science Applications

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review (2018, methodology): “The McCracken report from an ITiCSE working group in 2001 [426], which raised concerns about students’ skills at the end”
An Australasian study of reading and comprehension skills in novice programmers, using the bloom and SOLO taxonomies (2006, background): “A 2001 ITiCSE working group assessed the programming ability of an international population of students from several universities ( McCracken et. al. 2001 ).”
Programming: factors that influence success (2005, background): “A multi-national, multi-institutional study on the programming skills of ﬁrst year CS students found that students struggled to achieve an average above 30% on assessments administered as part of their study [14].”
Methods and tools for exploring novice compilation behaviour (2006, background): “, Bootstrapping CS Education Research, Scaffolding CS Education Research, and both BRACE and BRACElet provide a model for a community of researchers to ask a question, collect a large amount of (potentially) diverse data, and address a research question from a number of different perspectives[8, 23,”
A media computation course for non-majors (2003, background): “The evidence for this statement includes international studies of programming performance [10], declining retention rates [5], and failure rates sometimes as high as 30% [17].”
Teaching the Nintendo generation to program (2002, background): “A just published report in the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin from a working group at ITICSE 2001 this last summer found shockingly low performance on simple programming problems, even among second year students, at four schools in three different countries ( McCracken et al., 2001 ).”
A Systematic Literature Review of Automated Feedback Generation for Programming Exercises (2018, background): “• learning programming is challenging [125], and students need help to make progress [29]; • programming courses are taken by thousands of students all over the world [20], and helping students individually with their problems requires a huge time investment of teachers [133].”
Common logic errors made by novice programmers (2018, background): “Novice programmers may find it particularly difficult to detect logic errors due to their relative lack of debugging experience combined with possible misconceptions in their programming knowledge [9, 12, 16].”
A Survey of Automated Assessment Approaches for Programming Assignments (2005, background): “McCracken et al. (2001) found in their study that the programming skills of ﬁrst year CS students were much lower than expected.”
Students’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming (2017, background): “Introductory programming courses are challenging to students (Guzdial 2015; McCracken et al. 2001), and novices often exhibit misconceptions and other difficulties in the context of learning to program that inhibit their ability to learn and make progress.”
Learning by Taking Apart: Deconstructing Code by Reading, Tracing, and Debugging (2016, background): “By contrast, in settings where it is important to program according to a specification (to spec), many people find it difficult to learn how to program; dropout and failure rates in computing courses are high [3, 21, 31, 39, 53].”
Why students drop out CS1 course? (2006, background): “Several multi-institutional studies [19, 16, 23] have indicated that there are serious deficiencies in the learning outcomes of students who have passed one or several programming courses in CS programs.”