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ERIC Number: EJ1435776
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Jun
Pages: 34
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-1946-6226
Debugging Pathways: Open-Ended Discrepancy Noticing, Causal Reasoning, and Intervening
David DeLiema; Jeffrey K. Bye; Vijay Marupudi
ACM Transactions on Computing Education, v24 n2 Article 28 2024
Learning to respond to a computer program that is not working as intended is often characterized as finding a singular bug causing a singular problem. This framing underemphasizes the wide range of ways that students and teachers could notice discrepancies from their intention, propose causes of those discrepancies, and implement interventions. Weaving together a synthesis of the existing research literature with new multimodal interaction analyses of teacher-student conversations during coding, we propose a framework for debugging that foregrounds this open-endedness. We use the framework to structure an analysis of three naturalistic debugging situations (with US 5th-10th graders) that range from solo debugging to collaborative discourse. We argue that a broken computer program is a polysemous object through which teachers and students actively and publicly notice, reason about, and negotiate different debugging pathways. We document students and teachers improvisationally altering a debugging pathway, justifying a particular pathway, and outwardly discussing competing pathways. This paper provides a framework for structuring debugging pedagogy to be less about scaffolding a student toward a specific pathway to a fix and more about exploring multiple possible pathways and judging the (learning) value of various routes.
Association for Computing Machinery. 2 Penn Plaza Suite 701, New York, NY 10121. Tel: 800-342-6626; Tel: 212-626-0500; Fax: 212-944-1318; e-mail: acmhelp@acm.org; Web site: http://toce.acm.org/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Education; Grade 5; Intermediate Grades; Middle Schools; Grade 6; Grade 7; Junior High Schools; Secondary Education; Grade 8; Grade 9; High Schools; Grade 10
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A