Background and Context: Multiple studies report that experienced instructors lack consensus on the difficulty of programming tasks for novices. However, adequately gauging task difficulty is needed for alignment: to select and structure tasks in order to assess what students can and cannot do. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine…

Background and Context: Subgoal labeled worked examples have been extensively researched, but the research has been reported piecemeal. This paper aggregates data from three studies, including data previously unreported, to holistically examine the effect of subgoal labeled worked examples across three student populations and across different…

Background and Context: Women are underrepresented in the field of computer science, a trend that in part can be traced to girls' early experiences with the discipline. Objective: Our aim is to show how three girls who became strong coders talked about their debugging practice at the intersection of problem solving, emotion, and identity. Method:…

Theories of mind are implicitly embedded in educational research. The predominant theory of mind during the latter half of the twentieth century has focused primarily on the individual mind in isolation, context-free problem-solving and mental representations and reasoning, what we refer to as "cognitivism." Over the last two decades, CS…