A study by a ITiCSE 2001 working group ("the McCracken Group") established that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. A popular explanation for this incapacity is that the students lack the ability to problem-solve. That is, they lack the ability to take a problem description, decompose it into sub-problems and implement them, then assemble the pieces into a complete solution. An alternative explanation is that many students have a fragile grasp of both basic programming principles and the ability to systematically carry out routine programming tasks, such as tracing (or “desk checking”) through code. This ITiCSE 2004 working group studied the alternative explanation, by testing

Boyer coined the term "scholarship of teaching", but the term has become ambiguous. In this paper, I nominate my own three categorizations of university computing educators: amateurs, students, and researchers. Amateurs may be excellent with students, but they do not routinely engage in dialog with other teachers about teaching. Students embrace the general theories of education, and write papers about how they have reconstructed their teaching in accordance with those theories. Researchers are engaged in the development and dissemination of a disciplinespecific pedagogy. Researchers do not reject the general education literature, but neither do they simply accept it. Instead, that literature offers theories that may or may not be verified in the laboratory of their own class room. They are involved in a discipline-based research community that transcends institutional boundaries. I illustrate these categories with examples from my own teaching, as an amateur, student, and researcher. 1.

In this paper we report on a multi-institutional investigation into the reading and comprehension skills of novice programmers. This work extends previous studies (Lister 2004, McCracken 2001) by developing a question set within two key pedagogical frameworks: the Bloom and SOLO taxonomies. From this framework of analysis some interesting emergent patterns relating the cognitive level of the questions to student performance have been identified. Keywords: Bloom’s Taxonomy, SOLO, novice programming, multi-institutional.