Investigating the Relationship Between Programming Experience and Debugging Behaviors in an Introductory Computer Science Course

Debugging is a challenging task for novice programmers in computer science courses and calls for specific investigation and support. Although the debugging process has been explored with qualitative methods and log data analyses, the detailed code changes that describe the evolution of debugging behaviors as students gain more experience remain relatively unexplored. In this study, we elicited “constituents” of the debugging process based on experts’ interpretation of students’ debugging behaviors in an introductory computer science (CS1) course. Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was used to study episodes where students fixed syntax/checkstyle errors or test errors. We compared epistemic networks between students with different prior programming experience and investigated how the networks evolved as students gained more experience throughout the semester. The ENA revealed that novices and experienced students put different emphasis on fixing checkstyle or syntax errors and highlighted interesting constituent co-occurrences that we investigated through further descriptive and statistical analyses.