A Framework for Describing and Analyzing Computer Programming Processes

There are increasing calls from industry and education systems to advance the computer programming and computational thinking capabilities of students, yet there is no comprehensive computing-specific framework or theory that educational researchers can use to describe and analyze the computer programming processes that students undertake. This paper explains the grounded theory development of a framework that can be used to describe and analyze computer programming activity, based on the in-depth qualitative coding (8580 speech acts) of ten pairs of university students attempting to solve an open-ended computer programming problem. An application of the framework for analyzing programming processes is provided to show how it could be used to detect significant differences between the programming processes of computing students as compared to education students. The implications of the study for analysis of different programming environments, tasks, instructional methods and cohorts of learners are discussed.