We present an empirical study using eye tracking equipment to understand how novices read source code in the context of two introductory programming classes. Our main goal is to begin to understand how novices read source code and to determine if we see any improvement in program comprehension as the course progresses. The results indicate that novices put in more effort and had more difficulty reading source code as they progress through the course. However, they are able to partially comprehend code at a later point in the course. The relationship between fixation counts and durations is linear but shows more clusters later in the course, indicating groups of students that learned at the same pace. The results also show that we did not see any significant shift in learning (indicated by the eye tracking metrics) during the course, indicating that there might be more than one course that needs to be taken over the course of a few years to realize the significance of the shift. We call for more studies over a student's undergraduate years to further learn about this shift.
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