In this paper we review the literature relating to the psychological/educational study of
programming. We identify general trends comparing novice and expert programmers …

Context: Programmers' mental models represent their knowledge and understanding of
programs, programming concepts, and programming in general. They guide programmers' …

Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better
understand how developers gain this understanding and how software development …

One of the central topics in computing education research (CEDR) is the exploration of how
a person learns their first programming language, also described in terms such as …

This study analyzed student responses to an examination, after the students had completed
one semester of instruction in programming. The performance of students on code tracing …

This paper reports on the authors use of the SOLO taxonomy to describe differences in the
way students and educators solve small code reading exercises. SOLO is a general …

In this paper we report on a multi-institutional investigation into the reading and
comprehension skills of novice programmers. This work extends previous studies (Lister …

Prior to performing a software change task, developers must discover and understand the
subset of the system relevant to the task. Since the behavior exhibited by individual …

Software Design-Cognitive Aspects covers a variety of areas including software analysis,
design, coding and maintenance. It details the history of the research that has been …

Learning to recognize and apply programming patterns—reusable abstractions of code—is
critical to becoming a proficient computer scientist. However, many introductory Computer …