Code comprehension, i.e. reading and understanding code, is an essential skill for a programmer and professional developers spend a lot of time understanding source code. While these are important motivations for developing code comprehension skills, they are some way off for a novice programmer, and not as immediate as a code-writing exercise for the next assessment.
However, code comprehension is required from an early point in a student’s study programme. Students are required to read code not only as part of writing code, but, crucially here, as part of a lecturer´s or book author´s exposition of an argument both in programming and other computer science courses. Code reading in lectures is a particularly challenging skill, as the code must be assimilated in seconds if the student is to keep up with the lecturer´s argument. Often, the lecturer also expects the student to be able to reuse the code in an assessed exercise or other learning activity. However, these kinds of code comprehension skills are often not explicitly addressed in the curriculum and hence, the students may receive little help understanding the importance of these skills and how to address them.
The project will therefore investigate this requirement for code comprehension skills. It has the potential to inform important changes to our programmes to improve students’ learning. This use for code comprehension has not been explored anywhere in the literature, and is therefore a really important area for research, given how many hundreds of thousands of students worldwide will be affected by it.
The aims of this project are to investigate
- to what extent code reading skills are required in lectures, through analysis of lecture materials and interviews with staff and students,
- to what degree intermediate students have the required code comprehension skills expected in order to be able to follow the lectures,
- what techniques intermediate students use when reading code in textbooks, lectures and on the web, and that enable them to re-use / re-factor the code for their own work
- and possibly, what pedagogical changes might help the students benefit more from code examples given in lectures etc
As one of the supervisors is primarily based in Scotland, much of the supervision will be via Zoom and the main language of communication will be English.