Using software testing to move students from trial-and-error to reflection-in-action
Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Scaffolding with object diagrams in first year programming classes: some unexpected results
Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers
Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Not seeing the forest for the trees: novice programmers and the SOLO taxonomy
Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
ACE '06 Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 52
ACE '06 Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 52
Hasty design, futile patching and the elaboration of rigor
Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Surely we must learn to read before we learn to write!
ACE '09 Proceedings of the Eleventh Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 95
Explaining program code: giving students the answer helps - but only just
Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on Computing education research
Concrete and other neo-Piagetian forms of reasoning in the novice programmer
ACE '11 Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference - Volume 114
Toward a shared understanding of competency in programming: an invitation to the BABELnot project
ACE '12 Proceedings of the Fourteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference - Volume 123
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Recent research on novice programmers has suggested that they pass through neo-Piagetian stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational stages, before eventually reaching programming competence at the formal operational stage. This paper presents empirical results in support of this neo-Piagetian perspective. The major novel contributions of this paper are empirical results for some exam questions aimed at testing novices for the concrete operational abilities to reason with quantities that are conserved, processes that are reversible, and properties that hold under transitive inference. While the questions we used had been proposed earlier by Lister, he did not present any data for how students performed on these questions. Our empirical results demonstrate that many students struggle to answer these problems, despite the apparent simplicity of these problems. We then compare student performance on these questions with their performance on six explain in plain English questions.