An intervention strategy to hone students' code understanding skills
Benito Mendoza, Laura Zavala · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2018
The main focus in programming courses is usually on writing code; students are asked to write programs after only being taught the syntax rules and a few examples. We believe that more emphasis needs to be put in code understanding skills, which are precursor skills to writing code. In this paper, we present the results of an intervention strategy we implemented with the goal of honing students f program understanding skills. Automatic Item Generation was used to generate a set of practice exercises individualized to each student fs needs. Results of pre and post-assessments from the intervention group and a control group show the benefits of dedicating time to program understanding.