Exploring the Mental Models of Undergraduate Programmers in the Context of Linked Lists
Harrison Chotzen, Alasdair J. Johnson, Parth M. Desai · 2019
This paper describes misconceptions students encounter as they design algorithms to implement linked list operations. The research was conducted in a qualitative manner [1], and aims to inform pedagogical practice in the data structures space. The design of our study involved conducting interviews with five undergraduate students, who were given a packet consisting of four questions involving arrays, linked lists, or binary search trees. Though participants showed a confident understanding of the way that linked lists work as static diagrams, when asked to reason about the reassignment of pointers during the design of insert and remove operations, the students seemed to struggle. The details of the representation of pointers as members of the linked list class appeared unclear to our participants, and we posit this gap of understanding was a primary source confusion. We posit increased attention to the object oriented implantation of linked lists in data structures education may result in improved learning outcomes.