Abstract:
A multi-national, multi-institutional study investigating
introductory programming courses drew on student
participants 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. This paper reports in detail on the
task that required participants to articulate a
commonplace search strategy. The results indicate that increasing measures of richness of articulation of a search
strategy are associated with higher marks in the course.
