[OOPSLA24] Profiling Programming Language Learning

Описание: Profiling Programming Language Learning (Video, OOPSLA 2024)
Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi
(Brown University, USA; Brown University, USA)

Abstract: This paper documents a year-long experiment to “profile” the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added interactive quizzes to The Rust Programming Language, the official textbook for learning Rust. Over 13 months, 62,526 readers answered questions 1,140,202 times. First, we analyze the trajectories of readers. We find that many readers drop-out of the book early when faced with difficult language concepts like Rust’s ownership types. Second, we use classical test theory and item response theory to analyze the characteristics of quiz questions. We find that better questions are more conceptual in nature, such as asking why a program does not compile vs. whether a program compiles. Third, we performed 12 interventions into the book to help readers with difficult questions. We find that on average, interventions improved quiz scores on the targeted questions by +20

Article: https://doi.org/10.1145/3649812

Supplementary archive: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10798571 (Badges: Artifacts Available, Artifacts Evaluated — Reusable, Results Reproduced)

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8639-6541, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5184-1975

Video Tags: rust education, digital textbooks, item response theory, oopslaa24main-p10-p, doi:10.1145/3649812, doi:10.5281/zenodo.10798571, orcid:0000-0001-8639-6541, orcid:0000-0001-5184-1975, Artifacts Available, Artifacts Evaluated — Reusable, Results Reproduced

Presentation at the OOPSLA 2024 conference, October 20–25, 2024, https://2024.splashcon.org/track/spla...
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN,