How people learn to program8 min read

A Multi-National Study of Reading and Tracing Skills in Novice Programmers

Raymond Lister, Elizabeth S. Adams, Sue Fitzgerald, William Fone, John Hamer, et al. · 2004 · ITiCSE Working Group Reports · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 36(4), 119–150

Across seven countries, many students who had passed a programming course could not reliably predict what a short piece of code would do.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1145/1044550.1041673 ↗

The short version

→556 students at twelve institutions answered multiple-choice questions that required reading and tracing short code fragments — no writing.
→A large fraction did poorly; the working group argues that struggling to write code often traces back to an inability to read it.
→The students who traced by hand — writing down variable values as they went — scored markedly higher than those who tried to ‘just see’ the answer.
→The paper is why Saasworld makes you trace before it lets you write.

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