An Exploration of Novice Programmers' Comprehension of Conditionals in Imperative and Functional Programming

Students of introductory programming courses are expected to develop higher-order thinking skills to inspect, understand and modify code. However, although novices can correctly write small programs, they appear to lack a more abstract, comprehensive grasp of basic constructs, such as conceiving the overall effect of alternative conditional flows. This work takes a little-explored perspective on the comprehension of tiny programs by asking students to reason about reversing conditionals in either an imperative or a functional context. More specifically, besides deciding if the given constructs can be reversed, students had to justify their choice by writing a reversing program or by providing suitable counterexamples. The students’ answers to four reversibility questions have been analysed through the lens of the SOLO taxonomy. 45% of students correctly identified the reversibility for the four code items; furthermore, more than 50% of each cohort were able to provide correct justifications for at least three of their four answers. Most incorrect answers were due to failures to consider border cases or to edit the conditional expressions appropriately to reverse the construct. Differences in comprehension between functional and imperative languages are explored indicating the explicit else paths of the functional examples facilitate comprehension compared with the implicit else (no update) of its imperative counterpart.