Disciplinary Variations in Computer Programming

Programming bugs are quite normal and usual for novice programmers. This article reports the findings of our research investigating disciplinary variations in the computer programming field from three perspectives, which are (i) the knowledge structure implied by the performance of each disciplinary group of students in the 26 question categories covering different knowledge points, (ii) the programming ability illustrated by the common bugs made by them respectively, and (iii) the knowledge acquisition ability suggested by the changes happened to the common bugs over a one-year period. The results support the hypothesis that the thinking pattern and the knowledge structure of students is shaped by their disciplinary context, and call into question the extent to which the knowledge acquisition process differs between different disciplinary groups. Overall, Students may use our result to look up the most common bugs in attempt to avoid them in the future. While instructors can use this result to continuously improve their curriculum and teaching practices for different disciplinary group of students respectively.