How people learn to program8 min read

Solving Parsons Problems Versus Fixing and Writing Code

Barbara J. Ericson, Lauren E. Margulieux, Jochen Rick · 2017 · Koli Calling '17: Proceedings of the 17th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, 20–29

Reassembling scrambled code blocks taught as much as writing the same code from scratch, in significantly less time.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1145/3141880.3141895 ↗

The short version

→135 students practised the same four problems in one of three ways: as two-dimensional Parsons problems with paired distractors, as fix-the-broken-code problems, or by writing the code from scratch.
→The Parsons group finished the practice in significantly less time; the pretest-to-posttest gains were statistically indistinguishable across all three conditions.
→The gains held on a retention test one week later, so this is not a same-day illusion.
→The lesson is not that writing code is unnecessary. It is that assembly buys the same structural practice more cheaply — which is why Saasworld has an order task kind at all.

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