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International Workshop on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online

HELMeTO 2019: Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online pp 97–112Cite as

On the Students’ Misconceptions in Object-Oriented Language Constructs

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1091))

Abstract

Analyze the Object-oriented (OO) source code developed by students provides useful formative tips to instructors. According to this, it is essential to understand the student’s real difficulties allowing instructors to shape effective courses. To provide run-time feedback to students and to study and analyze the evolution of their performances offline and over time we designed a framework and developed a tool. It allows to identify students’ misconceptions analysing source code and to create personalized student reports automatically. In this paper, we present an empirical study, conducted using our toolchain, that involves 1627 projects extracted from the multi-institution Blackbox dataset. We identified a violation model for Java language constructs based on established results in the computing education community. Afterwards, we grouped such violations in categories and analyzed the relations among them. Our contributions might be helpful in delivering formative feedback and supporting instructors who teach Java and object-oriented programming in general.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net.

  2. 2.

    https://pmd.github.io.

  3. 3.

    http://findbugs.sourceforge.net.

  4. 4.

    http://www.sonarqube.org.

  5. 5.

    https://www.bluej.org/.

  6. 6.

    “payload files”, at time of writing, go from Jun 12th 2013 to Oct 16th 2017; it was not possible to get the completed source code before and after this time interval.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Pasquale Ardimento

  2. University Giustino Fortunato, Benevento, Italy

    Mario Luca Bernardi

  3. Unitelma Sapienza, Rome, Italy

    Marta Cimitile

Authors
  1. Pasquale Ardimento
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  2. Mario Luca Bernardi
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  3. Marta Cimitile
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pasquale Ardimento .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain

    Daniel Burgos

  2. Unitelma Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Marta Cimitile

  3. Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Pietro Ducange

  4. Università degli Studi eCampus, Novedrate, Como, Italy

    Riccardo Pecori

  5. SMARTEST Research Centre, Università degli Studi eCampus, Novedrate, Como, Italy

    Pietro Picerno

  6. Università degli Studi eCampus, Novedrate, Italy

    Paolo Raviolo

  7. Open University in the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Christian M. Stracke

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Ardimento, P., Bernardi, M.L., Cimitile, M. (2019). On the Students’ Misconceptions in Object-Oriented Language Constructs. In: Burgos, D., et al. Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online. HELMeTO 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31284-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31284-8_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31283-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31284-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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