What do novices learn during program comprehension?

Abstract

Comprehension of computer programs involves identifying important program parts and inferring relationships between them. The ability to comprehend a computer program is a skill that begins its development in the novice programmer and reaches maturity in the expert programmer. This research examined the beginning of this process, that of comprehension of computer programs by novice programmers. The mental representations of the program text that novices form, which indicate the comprehension strategies being used, were examined. In the first study, 80 novice programmers were tested on their comprehension of short program segments. The results suggested that novices form detailed, concrete mental representations of the program text, supporting work that has previously been done with novice comprehension. Their mental representations were primarily procedural in nature, with little or no modeling using real‐world referents. In a second study, the upper and lower quartile comprehenders from Study 1 were test...