Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

By Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Simon, Ibrahim Albluwi, Brett A. Becker, Michail N. Giannakos, Amruth N. Kumar, Linda M. Ott, James H. Paterson, M. A. Scott, Judithe Sheard and 1 more. Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 2018

480 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed6fa7b81cb0d546be4c2b32f60a4c014bd6449e

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In Computer Science Applications

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The Robots Are Here: Navigating the Generative AI Revolution in Computing Education (2023, background): “In the past 50+ years, a great body of research within the SIGCSE community addressed many trends, opportunities and challenges in Introductory Programming (CS1) courses [123].”
Programming Is Hard - Or at Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities and Challenges of AI Code Generation (2022, background): “The introductory programming sequence has been the focus of much research over several decades [5, 26] and the challenges of programming at the level required of a first-year computing student have been debated extensively [3, 4, 25].”
Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI (2023, background): “In particular, the ease with which students can auto-generate solutions to programming assessments focuses new attention on the well-studied area of introductory programming [5, 25].”
The Robots Are Coming: Exploring the Implications of OpenAI Codex on Introductory Programming (2022, background): “A comprehensive review of introductory programming literature from 2018 makes no mention of tools that use AI to produce code, and only mentions a few machine learning based systems to analyse code or provide feedback along with intelligent tutoring systems that aim to provide customised learning ap”
Studying the effect of AI Code Generators on Supporting Novice Learners in Introductory Programming (2023, unknown): “A full review of introductory programming research is beyond the scope of this paper, and instead we refer the reader to recent surveys on the topic [7, 59].”
Experimenting with Model Solutions as a Support Mechanism (2019, background): “A range of pedagogical practices that can be used to alleviate the issue exist [36], and introductory programming courses in general have been studied extensively [23].”