Brian Hanks

Pair-programming helps female computer science students

Pair-programming has been found to be very beneficial in educational settings. Students who pair in their introductory programming course are more confident, have greater course completion and pass rates, and are more likely to persist in computer-related majors. Although pairing helps all students, we believe that it is particularly beneficial for women because it addresses several significant factors that limit womens participation in computer science. We provide reasons for our belief that pair-programming helps women persist in these majors. We also repeat, with special emphasis on the impact on women, some details published elsewhere regarding our experiments on pair-programming with college and university students. Additionally, we provide new data that supports our original findings.

Program quality with pair programming in CS1

Prior research on pair programming has found that compared to students who work alone, students who pair have shown increased confidence in their work, greater success in CS1, and greater retention in computer-related majors. In these earlier studies, pairing and solo students were not given the same programming assignments. This paper reports on a study in which this factor was controlled by giving the same programming assignments to pairing and solo students. We found that pairing students were more likely to turn in working programs, and these programs correctly implemented more required features. Our findings were mixed when we looked at some standard complexity measures of programs. An unexpected but significant finding was that pairing students were more likely to submit solutions to their programming assignments.

Experimenting with pair programming in the classroom

There is now a substantial body of evidence in support of the use of pair programming in the classroom[3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14]. Some of the data is anecdotal and some is the result of formal experiments. We are not aware of any published data that raises concerns about allowing students to complete programming projects using pair programming.In this paper we present data from three studies performed at UCSC. All three studies support the position that pair programming results in more student learning.

Pair programming in education: a literature review

This article provides a review of educational research literature focused on pair programming in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Research suggests that the benefits of pair programming include increased success rates in introductory courses, increased retention in the major, higher quality software, higher student confidence in solutions, and improvement in learning outcomes. Moreover, there is some evidence that women, in particular, benefit from pair programming. The literature also provides evidence that the transition from paired to solo programming is easy for students. The greatest challenges for paired students appear to concern scheduling and partner compatibility. This review also considers practical issues such as assigning partners, teaching students to work in pairs, and assessing individual contributions, and concludes with a discussion of open research questions.

Empirical evaluation of distributed pair programming

Pair programming, in which two individuals share a single computer to collaboratively develop software, has been shown to have many benefits in industry and in education. One drawback of pair programming is its collocation requirement, which limits its use to situations where the partners can physically meet. A tool that supported distributed pair programming, in which the partners could pair from separate locations, would remove this impediment. This paper discusses the development and empirical evaluation of such a tool. A significant feature of this tool is the presence of a second cursor that supports gesturing. Students who used the tool in their introductory programming course performed as well as collocated students on their programming assignments and final exam. These students also spent less time working by themselves. They also felt that the gesturing feature was useful and used it regularly.

Student attitudes toward pair programming

Students in four introductory programming classes who participated in a pair programming study had very positive attitudes toward pair programming: they liked it, thought that it was fun, would like to do it again, and believed that they learned more because they paired. Although the students as a whole had positive attitudes, the results were not consistent between instructors; in particular, the students in one of the courses were significantly less positive about pair programming. The implications of instructor-based differences in attitude are discussed.This paper also examines the relationship between student confidence and attitudes toward pair programming. The most confident students liked pairing the most, while the least confident students liked it the least. This finding contradicts results that have been reported elsewhere.

Student performance in CS1 with distributed pair programming

Pair programming has been shown to provide many pedagogical benefits, particularly for students who are learning to program. One drawback with pair programming is its collocation requirement, which makes it difficult for some students to enjoy these benefits. We report on an experiment with a tool that allows students to pair program from separate locations. Our results indicate that students who experience the increased flexibility of distributed pairing perform as well in their introductory programming course as students who have to physically meet in order to pair. These students are also as confident as the collocated students. We also confirm earlier results reported by others that pair programming results in greater student confidence and increased student performance.

Debugging From the Student Perspective

Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be effective. Pattern matching, particularly at the syntactic level, is an important technique for beginners. The Web has emerged as an obvious first place to look for similar examples. Lack of Web materials at an appropriate beginner level leads to flailing. Hypothesizing about the cause of bugs is an underdeveloped skill.

Peerwise: replication study of a student-collaborative self-testing web service in a u.s. setting

PeerWise is a collaborative web-based system that engages students in the creation and evaluation of a test bank of multiple-choice questions. Previous studies involving two large CS1 courses in New Zealand have provided preliminary evidence that PeerWise usage is positively correlated with exam performance. In addition, it was reported that the student generated assessment questions were mostly free from errors and were clearly written, and the students appeared to positively value the system. Here we report on the first use of PeerWise in a CS1.5 course (second programming course) in the United States. Although the usage model was modified slightly to accommodate pedagogical factors, we highlight similar positive outcomes to those observed in New Zealand. Of particular note, students who were most active using PeerWise improved their rank in class relative to their peers who were less active.

Problems encountered by novice pair programmers

In a study of the types of problems encountered by students that led them to seek assistance, Robins et al. [2006] found that the most common problems were related to trivial mechanics. The students in this study worked by themselves on their programming exercises. This article discusses a replication of the Robins et al. study in which the subjects pair programmed. The types of problems encountered by the pairing students were similar to those of the solo students. The number of problems requiring assistance was much smaller for the pairing students, which suggests that they were able to resolve more problems on their own.