Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 317

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 21 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Language-Independent Conceptual “Bugs” in Novice Programming

Open access
Pea, Roy D.·1986·Journal of Educational Computing Research

Abstract

This article argues for the existence of persistent conceptual “bugs” in how novices program and understand programs. These bugs are not specific to a given programming language, but appear to be language-independent. Furthermore, such bugs occur for novices from primary school to college age. Three different classes of bugs—parallelism, intentionality, and egocentrism—are identified, and exemplified through student errors. It is suggested that these classes of conceptual bugs are rooted in a “superbug,” the default strategy that there is a hidden mind somewhere in the programming language that has intelligent interpretive powers.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2190/689t-1r2a-x4w4-29j2

Cites

21 of 21 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 21 references

Cited by

See all 317

Metadata

Authors
Pea, R. D.
Venue
Journal of Educational Computing Research
Published
1986-02
Volume
2
Issue
1
Pages
25-36
ISSN
  • 0735-6331 (ISSN-L)
  • 1541-4140
OpenAlex
W2099421759
Cited by
317
References
21
FWCI
24.62
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Language-Independent Conceptual “Bugs” in Novice Programming. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2190/689t-1r2a-x4w4-29j2
The paper
Pea, R. D. (1986). Language-Independent Conceptual “Bugs” in Novice Programming. Journal of Educational Computing Research. https://doi.org/10.2190/689t-1r2a-x4w4-29j2

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.