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Not seeing the forest for the trees: novice programmers and the SOLO taxonomy

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Annual Joint Conference Integrating Technology into Computer Science Education archive
Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education table of contents

Bologna, Italy

SESSION: CS eduacation research I table of contents

Pages: 118 - 122

Year of Publication: 2006

ISBN:1-59593-055-8

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Authors

Raymond Lister	University of Technology, Sydney, Broadway, Australia
Beth Simon	University of California, San Diego, CA
Errol Thompson	Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Jacqueline L. Whalley	Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
Christine Prasad	Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand

Sponsors

SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

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ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 9, Downloads (12 Months): 115, Citation Count: 18

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abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

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ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the authors use of the SOLO taxonomy to describe differences in the way students and educators solve small code reading exercises. SOLO is a general educational taxonomy, and has not previously been applied to the study of how novice programmers manifest their understanding of code. Data was collected in the form of written and think-aloud responses from students (novices) and educators (experts), using exam questions. During analysis, the responses were mapped to the different levels of the SOLO taxonomy. From think-aloud responses, the authors found that educators tended to manifest a SOLO relational response on small reading problems, whereas students tended to manifest a multistructural response. These results are consistent with the literature on the psychology of programming, but the work in this paper extends on these findings by analyzing the design of exam questions.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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	9	Raymond Lister , Elizabeth S. Adams , Sue Fitzgerald , William Fone , John Hamer , Morten Lindholm , Robert McCartney , Jan Erik Moström , Kate Sanders , Otto Seppälä , Beth Simon , Lynda Thomas, A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.36 n.4, December 2004
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CITED BY 18

	Colin G. Johnson , Ursula Fuller, Is Bloom's taxonomy appropriate for computer science?, Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea conference on Computing education research: Koli Calling 2006, February 01-01, 2006, Uppsala, Sweden
	Jerry Mead , Simon Gray , John Hamer , Richard James , Juha Sorva , Caroline St. Clair , Lynda Thomas, A cognitive approach to identifying measurable milestones for programming skill acquisition, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.38 n.4, December 2006
	Jacqueline Whalley , Christine Prasad , P. K. Ajith Kumar, Decoding doodles: novice programmers and their annotations, Proceedings of the ninth Australasian conference on Computing education, p.171-178, January 30-February 02, 2007, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
	Angela Carbone , Michael de Raadt , Judy Kay , Raymond Lister , Andrew Litchfield , Richard Raban , Paul Roe , Daniel Santamaria , Judy Sheard , John Shepherd , Andrew Solomon , Richard Thomas, The carrick vision and computing education: four case studies in multi-institutional collaboration, Proceedings of the ninth Australasian conference on Computing education, p.3-8, January 30-February 02, 2007, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
	Errol Thompson, Holistic assessment criteria: applying SOLO to programming projects, Proceedings of the ninth Australasian conference on Computing education, p.155-162, January 30-February 02, 2007, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
	Linda Mannila, Novices' progress in introductory programming courses, Informatics in education, v.6 n.1, p.139-152, January 2007
	Ursula Fuller , Colin G. Johnson , Tuukka Ahoniemi , Diana Cukierman , Isidoro Hernán-Losada , Jana Jackova , Essi Lahtinen , Tracy L. Lewis , Donna McGee Thompson , Charles Riedesel , Errol Thompson, Developing a computer science-specific learning taxonomy, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.39 n.4, December 2007
	Linda Mannila, Progress reports and novices' understanding of program code, Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea conference on Computing education research: Koli Calling 2006, February 01-01, 2006, Uppsala, Sweden
	Mike Lopez , Jacqueline Whalley , Phil Robbins , Raymond Lister, Relationships between reading, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming, Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research, p.101-112, September 06-07, 2008, Sydney, Australia
	Carsten Schulte, Block Model: an educational model of program comprehension as a tool for a scholarly approach to teaching, Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research, p.149-160, September 06-07, 2008, Sydney, Australia
	Raymond Lister, After the gold rush: toward sustainable scholarship in computing, Proceedings of the tenth conference on Australasian computing education, January 01-01, 2008, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
	Judy Sheard , Angela Carbone , Raymond Lister , Beth Simon , Errol Thompson , Jacqueline L. Whalley, Going SOLO to assess novice programmers, Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 30-July 02, 2008, Madrid, Spain
	Tony Clear , Jenny Edwards , Raymond Lister , Beth Simon , Errol Thompson , Jacqueline Whalley, The teaching of novice computer programmers: bringing the scholarly-research approach to Australia, Proceedings of the tenth conference on Australasian computing education, p.63-68, January 01-01, 2008, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
	Paul Denny , Andrew Luxton-Reilly , Beth Simon, Evaluating a new exam question: Parsons problems, Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research, p.113-124, September 06-07, 2008, Sydney, Australia
	Donald Acton , Kimberly Voll , Steven Wolfman , Benjamin Yu, Pedagogical transformations in the UBC CS science education initiative, Proceedings of the 14th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, May 01-02, 2009, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
	Raymond Lister , Colin Fidge , Donna Teague, Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.41 n.3, September 2009
	Anne Venables , Grace Tan , Raymond Lister, A closer look at tracing, explaining and code writing skills in the novice programmer, Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop, August 10-11, 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA
	Albrecht Ehlert , Carsten Schulte, Empirical comparison of objects-first and objects-later, Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop, August 10-11, 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA