The ability to articulate strategy as a predictor of programming skill
Norma P. Simon, Quintin I. Cutts, Sally A. Fincher, Patricia Haden, Anthony V. Robins, Ken Sutton, Bob Baker, Ilona Box, Michael de RAADT, John Hamer, Margaret Hamilton, Raymond Lister, Marian Petre, Denise Tolhurst, Jodi Tutty · University of Southern Queensland ePrints (University of Southern Queensland) · 2006
A multi-national, multi-institutional study investigating introductory programming courses drew on student participants 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 commonplace search and design tasks, and attitudes to studying. This paper reports in detail on the task that required participants to articulate a commonplace search strategy. The results indicate that increasing measures of richness of articulation of a search strategy are associated with higher marks in the course. © 2006, Australian Computer Society, Inc.