An Exploration of High School Students' Self-Confidence while Analysing Iterative Code

A number of studies on novice programming report that loops and conditionals can be potential sources of errors and misconceptions. We then felt the need to engage in a more systematic and in-depth investigation about the teaching and learning of iteration in some representative high schools of our regional area. As a medium-term outcome of this endeavour we expect to get fine-grained insights about the nature of students' difficulties, on the one hand, as well as to identify possible pedagogical approaches to be adopted by teachers, on the other. As a step of this project, we designed and administered a survey composed of a set of small tasks, addressing students’ understanding of iteration in terms of code reading abilities. After summarising the motivations underlying the choice of the tasklets and the overall structure of the instrument, in this paper we will focus on a particular aspect which has not yet received extensive attention in the computer science education literature. Specifically, we will consider students' perception of self-confidence, in connection with their actual performance in each task, the specific program features, the cognitive demands (procedural vs. higher-level thinking skills), and the use of code vs. flow-charts. A noteworthy result of this analysis is that students’ perception of self-confidence is poorly correlated to actual performance in the task at hand. The main implications of our study are twofold, pertaining our understanding of less conspicuous facets of the learning of iteration as well as possible pedagogical strategies to strengthen metacognitive skills.