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Analysis of Novices' Web-Based Help-Seeking Behavior While Programming

Published: 03 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Web-based help-seeking -- finding and utilizing websites to solve a problem -- is a critical skill during programming in both professional and academic settings. However, little work has explored how students, especially novices, engage in web-based help-seeking during programming, or what strategies they use and barriers they face. This study begins to investigate these questions through analysis of students' web-search behaviors during programming. We collected think-aloud, screen recording, and log data as students completed a challenging programming task. Students were encouraged to use the web for help when needed, as if in an internship. We then qualitatively analyzed the data to address three research questions: 1) What events motivate students to use web search? 2) What strategies do students employ to search for, select, and learn from web pages? 3) What barriers do students face in web search, and when do they arise? Our results suggest that that novices use a variety of web-search strategies -- some quite unexpected -- with varying degrees of success, suggesting that web search can be a challenging skill for novice programmers. We discuss how these results inform future research and pedagogy focused on how to support students in effective web search.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Student Perceptions of the Help Resource LandscapeProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701851(596-602)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2024)An Investigation of the Drivers of Novice Programmers' Intentions to Use Web Search and GenAIProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671112(487-501)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Debugging with an AI Tutor: Investigating Novice Help-seeking Behaviors and Perceived LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671092(84-94)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
March 2023
1481 pages
ISBN:9781450394314
DOI:10.1145/3545945
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 03 March 2023

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Author Tags

  1. computer science education
  2. help-seeking
  3. novice programming
  4. web-search

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Student Perceptions of the Help Resource LandscapeProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701851(596-602)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2024)An Investigation of the Drivers of Novice Programmers' Intentions to Use Web Search and GenAIProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671112(487-501)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Debugging with an AI Tutor: Investigating Novice Help-seeking Behaviors and Perceived LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671092(84-94)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow QuestionsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642596(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Leveraging LSTM and Pre-trained Model for Effective Summarization of Stack Overflow Posts2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00062(618-623)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
  • (undefined)Rethinking computing students’ help resource utilization through sequentialityACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/3716860

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