Factors in Novice Programmers' Poor Tracing Skills

摘要

Novice programmers' program tracing skills have been found to be poor but the difficulties leading to inefficient tracing are not well known. To study this issue, we conducted exploratory interviews that included program comprehension tasks with novice students and analyzed comprehension protocols to identify specific difficulties affecting novices' ability to trace programs. Based on the qualitative analysis, we describe four specific difficulties students had with program tracing—single value tracing, confusing function and structure, inability to use external representations, and inability to raise abstraction level—and discuss ways to help students to overcome these difficulties.