An Exploratory Investigation on High-School Students' Understanding of Threads

Students' difficulties to learn concurrent programming are well known amongst Computer Science instructors. While in the International Computing Education community it is still up to debate the extent to which such topic should be included in pre-university curricula, based on our country's Ministerial guidelines for technical high schools with a specialization in Computer Science, students are expected to acquire key concurrent programming skills. With the aim of getting insights about the nature of students' difficulties, as well as to identify possible pedagogical approaches to be adopted by teachers, we have undertaken an investigation on students' perception, proficiency and self-confidence when dealing with concurrency and synchronization tasks. We then present the results of a preliminary study carried out by submitting a survey in a couple of representative high schools of our area. The survey includes subjective perception questions as well as small program comprehension tasks addressing students' understanding of thread synchronization. Moreover, we also analyze students' self-confidence in connection with their actual performance in such tasks. A total of 68 high school students were engaged in the survey. Our findings indicate that students' perception of self-confidence tends to weakly correlate to their actual performance, although more in general they express a low self-confidence level in relation to the topic. In particular, the results clearly show that the concept of thread synchronization is especially difficult to master for a large majority of them.