Going SOLO to assess novice programmers

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Going SOLO to assess novice programmers

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Annual Joint Conference Integrating Technology into Computer Science Education archive
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education table of contents

Madrid, Spain

SESSION: Assessment table of contents

Pages 209-213

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-078-4

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Authors

Judy Sheard	Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Angela Carbone	Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Raymond Lister	Univesity of Technology, Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Beth Simon	University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
Errol Thompson	Lower Hutt, New Zealand
Jacqueline L. Whalley	Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Sponsors

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

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 5, Downloads (12 Months): 86, Citation Count: 4

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ABSTRACT

This paper explores the programming knowledge of novices using Biggs' SOLO taxonomy. It builds on previous work of Lister et al. (2006) and addresses some of the criticisms of that work. The research was conducted by studying the exam scripts for 120 introductory programming students, in which three specific questions were analyzed using the SOLO taxonomy. The study reports the following four findings: when the instruction to students used by Lister et al. - "In plain English, explain what the following segment of Java code does" - is replaced with a less ambiguous instruction, many students still provide multistructural responses; students are relatively consistent in the SOLO level of their answers; student responses on SOLO reading tasks correlate positively with performance on writing tasks; postgraduates students manifest a higher level of thinking than undergraduates.

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.

	1	Adelson, B. When novices surpass experts: The difficulty of a task may increase with expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 3 (1984), 483--495.
	2	Biggs, J. B. & Collis, K. F. Evaluating the quality of learning: The SOLO taxonomy (Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome). New York, Academic Press, 1982.
	3	Raymond Lister , Beth Simon , Errol Thompson , Jacqueline L. Whalley , Christine Prasad, Not seeing the forest for the trees: novice programmers and the SOLO taxonomy, Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 26-28, 2006, Bologna, Italy
	4	McKeithen, K., Reitman, J.., Rueter, H., & Hirtle, S. (1981). Knowledge organization and skill differences in computer programmers. Canadian J. of Psychology, 13, 307--325.
	5	Susan Wiedenbeck , Vikki Fix , Jean Scholtz, Characteristics of the mental representations of novice and expert programmers: an empirical study, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, v.39 n.5, p.793-812, Nov. 1993 [doi>10.1006/imms.1993.1084]

CITED BY 4

	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 Philpott , Tony Clear , Jacqueline Whalley, Understanding student performance on an algorithm simulation task: implications for guided learning, Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, March 04-07, 2009, Chattanooga, TN, USA
	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
	Judy Sheard , S. Simon , Margaret Hamilton , Jan Lönnberg, Analysis of research into the teaching and learning of programming, Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop, August 10-11, 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA