Analysis of Novices' Conceptual Gap for an ITS for Novice Programmers

Abstract

One of the main causes which cause novices to produce bugs and to reach impasses while programming is the gap between concepts used in the daily world and those used in the programming world. How to understand novices' mistakes and how to teach them are very important for an ITS. Although a lot of efforts have been devoted to the research on ITSs for novice programmers, less attention has been paid to the gap and few efforts have been made to understand novices' mistakes through the correlation between the daily world and the programming world. Our major purpose in this research is to help novices bridge the gap through the correlation between the daily world and the programming world as early as possible. The knowledge structure is organized in the three-layer hierarchy : a program model, an abstract model and a task (requirement, specification) model for better communication between the system and learners and better understanding of novices' errors. The abstract model in the intermediate layer which manages the relationship between the program model and the task model. Through these three models, the novices' bugs and misconcepts are analyzed. Bugs are understood as incorrect choices of devices in models. The reasons why novices commit errors are captured as the misconceptions about the relation of the corresponding devices in different models or misconceptions about devices of each model. Based on them, appropriate tutoring strategies are adopted.