Recalling Programming Competence
Jens Bennedsen, Michael E. Caspersen · 2009
Programming is recognised as one of seven grand challenges in computing education and attracts much attention in com-puting education research. Most research in the area con-cerns teaching methods, educational technology, and stu-dent understanding/misconceptions. Typically, evaluation of learning outcome takes place during or immediately fol-lowing the educational activity. In this research, we con-duct a qualitative investigation of sustainability of program-ming competence by studying the effect of recalling pro-gramming competence long time after the educational activ-ity has taken place. Our population consists of ten students who have taken an introductory object-oriented program-ming course 3, 15, or 27 months prior to our study. None of the students have been exposed to programming in the intervening period. As expected, our research shows that syntactical issues in general hinder immediate programming productivity, but more interestingly it also indicate that a tiny retraining activity and simple guidelines is enough to recall programming competence and overcome syntactical issues.