The McCracken Study - 12 years on
Ian Utting · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · 2013
In 2001, an ITiCSE working group led by Mike McCracken met in Canterbury to analyze a study of novice programmers at institutions around the world. The working group produced the second most highly cited paper in SIGCSE's publication history, but had two more significant outcomes: It revealed that CS1 students were less proficient at programming than anyone, including their teachers, thought they were; and it set the scene for a number of other medium-to-large scale multi-national multi-institutional studies of beginning students. Despite this, and an explicit exhortation in the original paper, there has been very little effort since directed at replicating or extending the work of this original group.