Novice Programmers' Reasoning about Reversing Conditional Statements
Cruz Izu, Claudio Mirolo, Amali Weerasinghe · 2018
We want undergraduate students to develop higher-order thinking skills that enable them to master program behaviour. Nonetheless, many students of both introductory and advanced programming courses appear to struggle with the abstraction required for this purpose. In particular, a recent think-aloud study showed a group of students were able to reason about and reverse the effect of assignments and vector updates, but most of them failed when asked to reverse a seemingly simple conditional statement.