Demonstrating the Ability of Elementary School Students to Reason About Programs

Over the last decade, CS Education researchers have developed different curricula, resources, and strategies to foster computer science learning in K-12 education. However, there is a lack of research about how elementary school students develop the ability to reason about programs. Reasoning about programs consists of a student's ability to read, write, debug, trace, and predict program behavior. This paper presents results from a think-aloud study of fourth and fifth grade students learning to program in Kodu. The goal of this study was to track students' understanding of how Kodu interprets and executes rules of a program. To understand students' reasoning of program execution, we explicitly taught them the Laws of Kodu computation which govern the decision making and execution process of Kodu rules. We collected students' responses on pre- and post-assessments, and we conducted think-aloud interviews with students where students explained their answers to assessment questions. We found that explicitly teaching students how Kodu rules are interpreted significantly improved their ability to understand the execution of programs and to explain program behavior. The results of this study provide insight into how elementary school students reason about simple programs, and how this ability can be scaffolded.