Program comprehension levels of abstraction for novices

Although various program comprehension models exist, their levels of abstraction and the related terminologies do not fit the programming pedagogy perspective. In this study, we proposed five abstraction levels for novice's program comprehension: statement, block, module, program and domain. The expansion and the terminologies of the proposed abstraction levels are inspired by the application of decomposition concept in programming pedagogy. To comprehend a program, novices understand decomposed parts (i.e. statements, blocks, and modules) of that program and chunk those parts into a meaningful whole (i.e. program) within a specific domain. We supported our revised abstraction levels with a user study. The revised abstraction levels are able to describe hierarchical levels of novices' program comprehension that map appropriately with their mental model. The proposed abstraction levels can be applied in designing empirical studies of novices' program comprehension that distinctly capture their different abstraction levels.