Expression tasks for novice programmers: Turning the attention to objectivity, reliability and validity

The understanding and transfer of mathematical expressions in a programming language is essential for studying engineering. Our experience of recent years shows that students increasingly struggle in reading, understanding and eventually transferring mathematical expressions to a programming expression so we need to provide many relevant tasks to help students overcoming this challenge. From educational psychology as well as our application-oriented research we know that the success of learning can be operationalized with objective, reliable and valid tasks only. Thus, we perceive tasks not only to be a training but also to be an empirical measuring instrument. However, tasks that are not theory driven are likely to be not suitable to measure the learning outcomes of students in an objective, reliable and valid manner. We'll present two different successful approaches that were developed individually at two different locations. Both propose a formal task description as well as a process model for task development that will facilitate the transfer of mathematical expressions to programming expressions. The tasks generated are valid and allow objective and reliable measurements of the students' learning outcomes. Our proposed tasks can also be used to iteratively improve and individualize introductory programing courses.