Prather, James

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Prather, James
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Prather, James

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  • Publication
    On Designing Programming Error Messages for Novices: Readability and its Constituent Factors
    (ACM, 2021-05-13)
    Denny, Paul 
    ;
    Prather, James 
    ;
    Becker, Brett A. 
    ;
    Mooney, Catherine 
    Programming error messages play an important role in learning to program. The cycle of program input and error message response completes a loop between the programmer and the compiler/interpreter and is a fundamental interaction between human and computer. However, error messages are notoriously problematic, especially for novices. Despite numerous guidelines citing the importance of message readability, there is little empirical research dedicated to understanding and assessing it. We report three related experiments investigating factors that influence programming error message readability. In the first two experiments we identify possible factors, and in the third we ask novice programmers to rate messages using scales derived from these factors. We find evidence that several key factors significantly affect message readability: message length, jargon use, sentence structure, and vocabulary. This provides novel empirical support for previously untested long-standing guidelines on message design, and informs future efforts to create readability metrics for programming error messages.
      109Scopus© Citations 30
  • Publication
    First Things First: Providing Metacognitive Scaffolding for Interpreting Problem Prompts
    (ACM Press, 2019-03-02)
    Prather, James 
    ;
    Pettit, Raymond 
    ;
    Becker, Brett A. 
    ;
    et al. 
    When solving programming problems, novices are often not aware of where they are in the problem-solving process. For instance, students who misinterpret the problem prompt will most likely not form a valid conceptual model of the task and fail to make progress towards a working solution. Avoiding such errors, and recovering from them once they occur, requires metacognitive skills that enable students to reflect on their problem-solving processes. For these reasons, developing metacognitive awareness is crucially important for novice students. Previous research has shown that explicitly teaching key steps of programming problem-solving, and having students reflect on where they are in the problem-solving process, can help students complete future programming assignments. Such metacognitive awareness training can be done through personal tutoring, but can be difficult to implement without a high ratio of instructors to students. We explore a more scalable approach, making use of an automated assessment tool, and conduct a controlled experiment to see whether scaffolding the problem-solving process would increase metacognitive awareness and improve student performance. We collected all code submissions by students in both control and experimental groups, as well as data from direct observation using a think-aloud protocol. We found that students who received the intervention showed a higher degree of understanding of the problem prompt and were more likely to complete the programming task successfully.
      702Scopus© Citations 67