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Incremental development is the process of writing a small snippet of code and testing it before moving on. For students in introductory programming courses, the value of incremental development is especially higher as they may suffer from more syntax errors, lack the proficiency to address complicated bugs, and may be more prone to frustration when struggling to correct code. However, to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions that aim to teach programming processes such as incremental development, we need to develop measures to assess such processes. In this paper, we present a way to measure incremental development. By qualitatively analyzing 15 student coding interviews, we identified common behaviors in the programming process that relate to incremental development. We then leveraged a dataset of over 1000 development sessions -- about 52,000 code snapshots at compilation time -- to automatically detect the common behaviors identified in our qualitative analysis. Finally, we crafted a formal metric, called the ``Measure of Incremental Development’' (MID), to quantify how effectively a student used incremental development during a programming session. The MID detects common non-incremental development patterns such as excessive debugging after large additions of code to automatically assess a sequence of snapshots. The MID aligns with humanmore »evaluations of incrementality with over 80% accuracy. Our metric enables new research directions and interventions focused on improving students' development practices.« less

Previous work in computing has shown that Black, Latinx, Native American and Pacific islander (BLNPI), women, first-generation, and transfer students tend to have worse outcomes during their time in university compared to their majority counterparts. Previous work has also found that students' incoming prerequisite course proficiency is positively correlated with their outcomes in a course. In this work, we investigate the role that prerequisite course proficiency has on outcomes between these groups of students. Specifically, we examine incoming prerequisite course proficiency in an Advanced Data Structures course. When comparing incoming prerequisite course proficiency between demographic pairs, we only see small differences for gender or by first-generation status. There is a sizeable difference by BLNPI status, although this difference is not statistically significant, possibly due to the small number of BLNPI students. In addition, we find that transfer students have sizeable and statistically significantly lower prerequisite course proficiency when compared to non-transfer students. For BLNPI and transfer students, we find that they also have lower grades in the prerequisite courses, which may partially explain their lower prerequisite course proficiency. These findings suggest that institutions need to find ways to better serve BLNPI and transfer students.

One of the goals of computing education research is to document the potential strengths and weaknesses of contemporary teaching methods in computing. Live coding has recently gained attention as one of the best practices for teaching programming. To offer a more comprehensive understanding of the existing body of research about live coding, we reviewed papers in computing education research that investigated the value of live coding in an educational setting. We categorized each paper based on (1) how it defines live coding, (2) whether its version of live coding could be considered active learning, (3) the type of study conducted, (4) types of data collected and the data analysis methods used, (5) evidence provided for the effectiveness of live coding, (6) reported benefits and drawbacks of live coding, and (7) reported theoretical frameworks used to explain the basis, effects or goals of live coding. We found that although live coding has been recommended as one of the best practices for teaching programming, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support claims about the effectiveness of live coding on student learning. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings and suggest future research directions that could develop a more holisticmore »understanding of this pedagogical technique.« less