This paper describes a multi-national, multi-institutional study that investigated introductory programming courses. Student participants were drawn from eleven institutions, mainly in Australasia, during the academic year of 2004. A number of diagnostic tasks were used to explore cognitive, behavioural, and attitudinal factors such as spatial visualisation and reasoning, the ability to articulate strategies for common-place search and design tasks, and attitudes to studying. The results indicate that: a deep approach to learning was positively correlated with mark for the course, while a surface approach was negatively correlated; spatial visualisation skills are correlated with success; a progression of map drawing styles identified in the literature has a significant effect with marks; and increasing measures of richness of articulation of a search strategy are also associated with higher marks. Finally, a qualitative analysis of short interviews identified the qualities that students themselves regarded as important to learn programming well. 1

Deciding what to teach novices about programming and what programming language to use is a common topic for debate. Should an industry relevant programming language be taught, or should a language designed for teaching novices be used? Typically, these questions are raised at university level, but in this paper we address them from a high school perspective.

How do beginning students approach problems which require them to read and understand code? We report on a Grounded Theory-based analysis of student transcripts from 12 institutions where students were asked to "think aloud " when solving such problems. We identify 19 strategies used by students. Primary results are that all students employ a range of strategies, there were (in total) many different strategies that were applied, students use multiple strategies on each individual problem, students applied different strategies to different types of questions, and students often applied strategies poorly. We show that strategies conform with existing education theories including Bloom's Taxonomy and the Approaches to Study Inventory. Additionally, we discuss emergent theories developed through a card sort process.

Students continue to struggle with learning to program, for reasons that we hypothesise are not solely cognitive. This paper reports on the results of a survey indicating that as students progress through a first programming unit, they enjoy it less, find it more difficult than they expected, and have less confidence in being able to successfully complete it. The students also believed that collaborative learning would have a beneficial impact on their learning outcomes and make studying programming more engaging, interactive, and fun. As a precursor to trialling collaborative problem solving and programming in introductory programming units at QUT, collaborative learning and its potential positive effect on the learning outcomes of programming students is investigated.

One indication of the maturation of Computer Science Education as a research-based discipline is the recent emergence of several large-scale studies spanning multiple institutions. This paper examines a “family ” of these multi-institutional, multi-national studies, detailing core elements and points of difference in both study design and the organization of the research team, and highlighting the costs and benefits associated with the different approaches.

When students are given code that is very similar in structure or purpose, how well do they actually recognise the similarities and differences? As part of the BRACElet project, a multi-institutional investigation into reading and comprehension skills of novice programmers, students were asked to classify four code segments that found the minimum or maximum in an array of numbers. This paper reports on the analysis of responses to this question and draws conclusions about the students ’ ability to recognise the similarities and differences in example code. It then raises questions with respect to an approach to teaching that uses variations in code examples.

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.

Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause. It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional ‘intelligence ’ or ‘problem-solving-ability ’ tests. We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. We can predict success or failure even before students have had any contact with any programming language with very high accuracy, and by testing with the same instrument after a few weeks of exposure, with extreme accuracy. We present experimental evidence to support our claim. We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed. 1

Expert programmers possess schemas, abstractions of concrete experiences, which help them solve programming problems and lessen the load on their working memory during problem solving. Possession of schemas is a key difference between novices and experts, which is why instructors need to help students construct them. One recent tool for facilitating schema formation in introductory programming are roles of variables, which represent stereotypes of variable use in computer programs (Sajaniemi, 2002). For instance, a variable with the role STEPPER is assigned values in a systematic and predictable order (e.g. ascending integers 0, 1, 2,...), whereas a FIXED VALUE is a variable whose value does not change. Roles of variables embody expert programmers’ tacit knowledge on variable usage patterns, which can be made explicit and taught to novice programmers. A small set of roles covers the vast majority of variable use in introductorylevel programs. Prior results obtained through analysis of examination results and observation of students suggest that using roles of variables in introductory programming education can increase students ' skills in comprehending and constructing programs (Byckling & Sajaniemi, 2006; Sajaniemi & Kuittinen, 2005). Little has been published about the experiences of teachers in higher education who have adopted roles in their programming courses, or about the methods of instruction

PeerWise is an online tool that involves students in the process of creating, sharing, answering and discussing multiple choice questions. Previous work has shown that students voluntarily use the large repository of questions developed by their peers as a source of revision for formal examinations – and activity level correlates with improved exam performance. In this paper, we investigate the quality of the questions created by students in a large introductory programming course. The ability of students to assess question quality is also examined. We find that students do, very commonly, ask clear questions that are free from error and give the correct answers. Of the few questions we examined that contained errors, in all cases those errors were detected, and corrected by other students. We also report that students are effective judges of question quality, and are willing to use the judgements of their peers to decide which questions to answer. We include several case studies of questions that are representative of the kinds of questions in the repository and provide insight for instructors considering use of PeerWise in their classrooms.