An Investigation of High School Students' difficulties with Iteration-Control Constructs

A number of studies report about students’ difficulties with basic flow-control constructs, and specifically with iteration. As part of a project whose long-run goal is identifying methodological tools to improve the learning of iteration constructs, we analyzed the answers of a sample of 164 high school students to three small programming tasks and two questions on their perception of difficulty. The results of the analysis suggest that more teaching efforts should be addressed to the development of a method to approach programming tasks and, more specifically for iteration, to the treatment of loop conditions in connection with the specifications in the application domain.