The Cloze procedure and software comprehensibility measurement
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Using the cloze procedure with computer programs: a deeper look
SIGCSE '86 Proceedings of the seventeenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
The effects of program-dependent and program-independent deletions on software cloze tests
Papers presented at the first workshop on empirical studies of programmers on Empirical studies of programmers
Studying programmer behavior experimentally: the problems of proper methodology
Communications of the ACM
Third time charm: Stronger prediction of programmer performance by software complexity metrics
ICSE '79 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Software engineering
Using the cloze procedure to assess program reading comprehension
SIGSCE '84 Proceedings of the fifteenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Psychological complexity of computer programs: an experimental methodology
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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This paper describes an experiment designed and conducted by undergraduate students as part of a senior research project in Computer Science. The experiment tested whether the program comprehension of a set of Fortran 77 programs can be predicted by the Oviedo/Van Verth model of program complexity. In the study, student programmers were asked to demonstrate their ability to understand programs through use of the cloze procedure. Three different kinds of Fortran 77 programs were used at three different levels of complexity determined by the model. It was hypothesized that program comprehension would decrease, i.e. the number of incorrect answers would increase, as the complexity of the programs increased. Due to a variety of reasons, the results were inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the experiment, the method selected, and implications for future experiments.