Prevalence of Programming Misconceptions in Primary School Students

Marco Hartmann

Michael Hielscher

Eva Marinus

This study investigates the prevalence of programming misconceptions among primary school students using the Programming Misconception Assessment Tool (ProMAT). The ProMAT was designed to measure programming misconceptions in two educational programming environments: Scratch and xLogo. We analyzed data from 366 Grade 5 and 6 children in German-speaking Switzerland to identify common misconceptions about sequences, loops, conditionals and to find out if they believed that there is a hidden mind in the programming environment that has intelligent interpretive powers (the so-called superbug misconception). In addition, we compared response patterns across the two programming environments. We found two misconceptions related to loops to be most common in Scratch, namely the belief that loops produce the exact same output in every iteration and that each command inside a loop is repeated separately. For xLogo, the most common misconception was from the sequences category, namely relating to the order of subprogram execution. Furthermore, variations of the superbug misconception were more prevalent among xLogo than among Scratch learners. We discuss how our results compare and add to the outcomes of earlier work, including the seminal study by Swidan and colleagues (2018). Finally, we explain how programming-environment-specific features might influence the formation or prevention of misconceptions in primary school students.