Abstract:
This paper describes a multi-national, multi-institutional
study - that investigated introductory programming
courses. Student participants were drawn from eleven
institutions, mainly in Australasia, during the academic
year of 2004. A number of diagnostic tasks were used to
explore cognitive, behavioural, and attitudinal factors such as spatial visualisation and reasoning, the ability to
articulate strategies for commonplace search and design
tasks, and attitudes to studying. The results indicate that
a deep approach to learning was positively correlated
with mark for the course, while a surface approach was
negatively correlated; spatial visualisation skills are
correlated with success; a progression of map drawing
styles identified in the literature has a significant
correlation with marks; and increasing measures of
richness of articulation of a search strategy are also
associated with higher marks. Finally, a qualitative
analysis of short interviews identified the qualities that
students themselves regarded as important to success in
programming.
