Abstract:

Prior programming experience has been commonly cited as a predictor of success in introductory programming courses at the university level. However, it is not clear what type of programming experience is a predictor of success for a university-level introductory programming course which is mainly object-oriented and taught using the Java programming language. In this paper, we discuss the results of an empirical study that was carried out to investigate whether prior programming experience following a procedural programming approach is a useful indicator of success for an object-oriented programming course. For this study, student data was collected from 146 first-year undergraduate computing students who had a procedural programming experience and enrolled in an introductory object-oriented programming course taught using the Java programming language. The data gathered was analyzed to determine whether there is a statistically significant correlation between experience in procedural programming and final scores in the introductory object-oriented programming course.

Surprisingly, the findings of the study show that there is no statistically significant correlation between procedural programming experience and performance in the object-oriented programming course. A discussion of the potential reasons for this discrepancy is provided.

Keywords:

Introductory programming, Programming performance, Predictor of success, Programming education.