Measuring Programming Competence by Assessing Chunk Structures in a Code Transcription Task
- Noorah Albehaijan, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
- Peter Cheng, Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
AbstractIn a simple transcription task in which sections of Java program code are copied by freehand writing, it is demonstrated that chunk related temporal signals are sufficiently robust to permit the measurement of programming competence. An experiment with 24 participants revealed that the number of views of the stimulus per trial and the duration of writing per stimulus view are both strongly correlated with inde-pendent measures of Java competence.