The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
An analysis of patterns of debugging among novice computer science students
Abstract
The process by which students learn to program is a major issue in computer science educational research. Programming is a fundamental part of the computer science curriculum, but one which is often problematic. It seems to be difficult to find an effective method of teaching that is suitable for all students. In this research we tried to gain insights into ways of improving our teaching by a careful examination of students' mistakes. The compiler errors that were generated by their programs together with the pattern that was observed in their debugging activities formed the basis of this research. We discovered that many students with a good understanding of programming do not acquire the skills to debug programs effectively, and this is a major impediment to their producing working code of any complexity. Skill at debugging seems to increase a programmer's confidence and we suggest that more emphasis be placed on debugging skills in the teaching of programming.
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Citations
Cites
Some Difficulties of Learning to Program
Du Boulay, B. (1986) · Journal of Educational Computing Research · doi:10.2190/3lfx-9rrf-67t8-uvk9 · Cited by 648
Cited by
Students’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming: A Literature Review
Qian, Y., & Lehman, J. (2018) · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · doi:10.1145/3077618 · Cited by 529
Becker, B. A., Denny, P., Pettit, R., Bouchard, D., Bouvier, D. J., Harrington, B., Kamil, A., Karkare, A., McDonald, C., Osera, P.-M., et al. (2019) · Proceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education · doi:10.1145/3344429.3372508 · Cited by 199
Investigating novice programming mistakes: educator beliefs vs. student data
Brown, N. C. C., & Altadmri, A. (2014) · Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on International computing education research · doi:10.1145/2632320.2632343 · Cited by 89
Fix the First, Ignore the Rest: Dealing with Multiple Compiler Error Messages
Becker, B. A., Murray, C., Tao, T., Song, C., McCartney, R., & Sanders, K. (2018) · Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · doi:10.1145/3159450.3159453 · Cited by 61
Development and Validation of the Programming Anxiety Scale
YILDIRIM, O. G., & OZDENER, N. (2022) · International Journal of Computer Science Education in Schools · doi:10.21585/ijcses.v5i3.140 · Cited by 18
Metadata
- Authors
- Ahmadzadeh, M., Elliman, D., & Higgins, C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2005-06-27
- Pages
- 84-88
- OpenAlex
- W1993199499
- Cited by
- 185
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 8.36
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Ahmadzadeh, M., Elliman, D., & Higgins, C. (2005). An analysis of patterns of debugging among novice computer science students. Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education. https://doi.org/10.1145/1067445.1067472
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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