Misconceptions in programming: Intuitive reasoning and tracing task performance across experience levels

In this article, we present the results of two studies on diagnosing beginning students’ misconceptions in tracing tasks: First, we show that tracing tasks can be used to design items that trigger misconceptions known from literature. We conducted a think-aloud study (N = 10), in which participants from two groups of no and minimal prior exposure to programming verbalized their thoughts while taking a test. The results indicate that certain incorrect answers are based on the thinking patterns of known misconceptions. The second study involving novice programmers consists of data from university students (N = 651) at five levels of experience who attended introductory computer science courses. Results indicate that errors made by participants vary across experience levels. Some misconceptions appear less frequently with experience, while others are more persistent, even among more advanced students. Taken together, the results of the study advance our understanding of the prevalence of known misconceptions and offer a preliminary insights into the learning processes that occur at the very beginning of programming education.