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The Effect of Sketching and Tracing on Instructors' Understanding of Student Misconceptions

Published: 14 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The operation of the notional machine presents a hidden but crucial process in students' understanding of introductory programming. When students trace though code, simulating the operation of the notional machine, this hidden operation becomes evident. When students sketch this trace by physically drawing it, the operation is also visible to peers, tutors, and teachers as well as to the students themselves. Increased accuracy on code reading problems has already been found for students who sketch and trace. I want to explore whether sketching and tracing helps others better understand what a student knows about the notional machine.

References

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Michelene TH Chi, Stephanie A Siler, and Heisawn Jeong. 2004. Can tutors monitor students' understanding accurately? Cognition and instruction 22, 3 (2004), 363--387.
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Matthew Hertz and Maria Jump. 2013. Trace-Based Teaching in Early Programming Courses. Proceedings of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2013), 561--566.
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Raymond Lister, Otto Seppala, Beth Simon, Lynda Thomas, Elizabeth S. Adams, Sue Fitzgerald, William Fone, John Hamer, Morten Lindholm, Robert McCartney, Jan Erik Mostrom, and Kate Sanders. 2004. A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers. In ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 36. 119--150.
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Linxiao Ma. 2007. Investigating and improving novice programmers' mental models of programming concepts. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Strathclyde.
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Robert McCartney, Jan Erik Mostrm, Kate Sanders, and Otto Seppl. 2005. Take note: the effectiveness of novice programmers annotations on examinations. Informatics in Education 4, 1 (2005), 69--86.
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Juha Sorva. 2013. Notional Machines and Introductory Programming Education. Trans. Comput. Educ. 13, 2, Article 8 (July 2013), 31 pages. 10.1145/2483710.2483713
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Juha Sorva, Ville Karavirta, and Lauri Malmi. 2013. A Review of Generic Program Visualization Systems for Introductory Programming Education. ACM Transactions on Computing Education 13, 4 (2013), 15.1 -- 15.64. //dx.doi.org/10.1145/2490822
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  1. The Effect of Sketching and Tracing on Instructors' Understanding of Student Misconceptions

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
August 2017
316 pages
ISBN:9781450349680
DOI:10.1145/3105726
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. notional machine
  3. novice programmers
  4. sketching
  5. tracing

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ICER '17
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ICER '17: International Computing Education Research Conference
August 18 - 20, 2017
Washington, Tacoma, USA

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ICER '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 180 submissions, 16%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

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ICER 2025
ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
August 3 - 6, 2025
Charlottesville , VA , USA

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