Investigating novices' in situ reflections on their programming process

Abstract

Prior work on novice programmers' self-regulation have shown it to be inconsistent and shallow, but trainable through direct instruction. However, priorwork has primarily studied self-regulation retrospectively, which relies on students to remember how they regulated their process, or in laboratory settings, limiting the ecological validity of findings. To address these limitations, we investigated 31 novice programmers' self-regulation in situ over 10 weeks. We had them to keep journals about their work and later had them to reflect on their journaling. Through a series of qualitative analyses of journals and survey responses, we found that all participants monitored their process and evaluated their work, that few interpreted the problems they were solving or adapted prior solutions. We also found that some students self-regulated their programming in many ways, while others in almost none. Students reported many difficulties integrating reflection into their work; some were completely unaware of their process, some struggled to integrate reflection into their process, and others found reflection conflicted with their work. These results suggest that self-regulation during programming is highly variable in practice, and that teaching selfregulation skills to improve programming outcomes may require differentiated instruction based on students self-awareness and existing programming practices.