How people learn to program8 min read

Relationships Between Reading, Tracing and Writing Skills in Introductory Programming

Mike Lopez, Jacqueline Whalley, Phil Robbins, Raymond Lister · 2008 · ICER '08: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Computing Education Research, 101–112

Tracing and ‘explain in plain English’ scores predict code-writing scores — evidence for a hierarchy of skills where reading comes first.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1145/1404520.1404531 ↗

The short version

→End-of-semester exam data from an intro course was analysed for how basic knowledge, tracing, explaining and writing related to each other.
→Tracing performance and ‘explain in plain English’ performance together explained a large share of the variance in code-writing performance.
→The authors propose a hierarchy: knowledge of constructs → tracing → explaining → writing, each building on the last.
→Practical reading: if writing is going badly, drop a level and practise the thing under it.

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