Abstract:

Despite the awareness of the important role of programming in today’s technological lifestyle and the fact that programming jobs are among the most sought after professions today, computer science students consider programming contents overly demanding and often avoid them.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the relevant literature and studies that examine factors that may significantly affect the performance of programming. We will give an overview of good and bad predictors of success in programming and factors that, so far, have not shown the prediction’s strength or their impact on the performance of programming hasn’t been sufficiently explored.
Knowledge of these factors is extremely important for computer science teachers in order to apply the appropriate teaching model for novices that emphasizes the development of the ability to anticipate and understand what happens when a specific computer program performs. Factors like good mathematical knowledge, attribution of success and good spatial maps sketching have proved to be good predictors of programming success while surface learning approach had shown strong negative impact on novices' programming performance. On the other hand, despite the expectations, student’s gender, number of years of programming, number of familiar programming languages haven't shown any significant impact on programming performance.

Keywords:

Programming, novices, predictors, teaching.