Tasks that can improve novices' program comprehension

This study aims at identifying tasks that can effectively promote novices' program comprehension. Based on literature of program comprehension and computer science education, we identified 14 tasks and classified them into homogeneous categories based on the Revised Bloom Taxonomy. We conducted a survey to rank these tasks within each Bloom category based on their potential effectiveness in developing the novices' program comprehension. The survey respondents were 154 programming and software engineering instructors from 13 universities. The results of the survey indicated that: a) for the remember category, recall received higher ranking than line documentation; b) for the understand category, representation received higher ranking than summarization; c) for the analyze category, the tasks ordered from the highest to the lowest rank are: tracing, debugging, search and reordering; d) for the create category, the tasks ordered from the highest to the lowest rank are: modification, extension, reuse and restructuring. The apply and evaluate categories contain one task each; and thus were not ranked. The outcomes indicated that tasks that were more commonly applied in teaching were received higher rankings. For example, tracing and representation received higher ranking as compared to other less common teaching tasks such as summarization and searching respectively. The findings of this study recommend that program comprehension skills can be improved through exercises on the different types of tasks identified in this survey. The next step is to conduct experiments of these novices in universities to validate the results of the conducted survey.