Learning Transfer in Novice Programmers: A Preliminary Study
Cruz Izu, Claudio Mirolo · 2021
Learning transfer refers to the ability to correctly apply learned skills, knowledge and behaviors to new situations or contexts. This paper explores novice programmers' transfer through the analysis of two related coding tasks completed by CS1 students as part of their assessment. The first task was a take-home practical and the second task was a lab practical exam; both tasks requested the implementation of a C function with an integer parameter from which the digits are to be extracted and operated on. The solution set generated from each task by a cohort of 255 CS1 students has been explored and classified in order to determine the extent of transfer from the practice task to the later assessment task.