How are students' programming skills developed: An empirical study in an object-oriented course

Qing Sun, Ji Wu*, Kaiqi Liu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel teaching method practiced in our Object-oriented (OO) course and a quantitative method for assessing how the students' programming skill have been improved. We report the empirical study on the 1956 items of data collected from 249 students who engaged in our course in the spring semester, 2018. A measurement model is proposed to assess students' programming skill in terms of programming performance and testing performance. The observation of how students' programming skills improve along assignments in our OO course is discussed by trend analysis and correlation analysis based on the collected data. The empirical results show that students' testing performance have positive significant correlation with programming performance. Furthermore, the correlation analyses show that design quality correlates with both programming performance and testing performance. Therefore, an early warning metric suite for both programming performance and testing performance in our OO course is proposed to indicate students' success in programming skills and provide hints to code reviewers on conducting the necessary testing activities. This study can give meaningful and useful feedback to programming and testing course instructor regarding to evaluate students' achievement in a programming course.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM Turing Celebration Conference - China, ACM TURC 2019
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450371582
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 ACM Turing Celebration Conference - China, ACM TURC 2019 - Chengdu, China
Duration: 17 May 201919 May 2019

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference2019 ACM Turing Celebration Conference - China, ACM TURC 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityChengdu
Period17/05/1919/05/19

Keywords

  • Empirical assessment
  • Object-Oriented Design
  • Programming Skills
  • Software Testing

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'How are students' programming skills developed: An empirical study in an object-oriented course'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this