A Curated Inventory of Programming Language Misconceptions

Abstract

Knowledge about misconceptions is an important element of pedagogical content knowledge. The computing education research community collected a large body of research on misconceptions, using a diverse set of definitions and approaches. Inspired by this prior work, we present an actionable definition of misconceptions, focused on the area most commonly studied: programming and programming languages. We then introduce an organizational structure for collections of programming language misconceptions. We study how existing collections fit our organization, and we present a curated inventory of programming language misconceptions that aims to follow our definition and structure. Our inventory goes beyond traditional programming misconception collections. It connects misconceptions to the authoritative specifications of languages, to places they may be triggered in textbooks, to research papers that discuss them, and it provides support for integrating programming language misconceptions into educational platforms.