Exploring students' understanding of concurrency a phenomenographic study

Abstract

This paper continues previous efforts in understanding the problems students face when learning concurrency. In this paper, we explore students' understanding of the subject using phenomenography in order to gain insights that can aid in explaining the underlying causes for common student mistakes in concurrency, which has been studied in depth previously. Students' experience of concurrency and critical sections were analyzed using a phenomenographic study based on interviews with students attending one of two courses on concurrency and operating systems. We present 6 categories describing students' experience of concurrency, and 4 categories describing students' experience of critical sections in this paper. Furthermore, these categories are related to previous results, both to explore how misconceptions in the categores relate to student mistakes and to estimate how common it is for each category to be discerned.