Charlie McDowell
Linda Werner
Abstract
Pair programming produces more proficient, confident programmers---and may help increase female representation in the field.
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Digital Library
- Hanks, B. and McDowell, C. Program quality with pair programming in CS1. In Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. (Leeds, UK, 2004), SIGCSE Bulletin, 176--180. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McDowell, C., Werner, L., Bullock, H., and Fernald, J. The effects of pair-programming on performance in an introductory programming course. In Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (KY, 2002) 38--42. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McDowell, C., Werner, L Bullock, H., and Fernald, J. The impact of pair programming on student performance and pursuit of computer science related majors. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society (Portland, OR, 2003), 602--607. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tech-Savvy Educating Girls in the New Computer Age. 2000. American Association of University Women Education Foundation; Executive summary at www.aauw.org/research/techexecsumm.cfm.Google Scholar
- Werner, L.L., Hanks, B., and McDowell, C. Pair-programming helps female computer science students. J. Educational Resources in Computing 4, 1 (2005). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Williams, L.A. and Kessler, R.R. All I really need to know about pair programming I learned in kindergarten. Commun. ACM 43, 5 (May 2000), 108--114. Google ScholarDigital Library
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- Williams, L., Kessler, R., Cunningham, W., and Jeffries, R. Strengthening the case for pair programming. IEEE Software 17, 4 (2000), 19--25. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Williams, L., McDowell, C., Nagappan, N., Fernald, J., and Werner, L.L. Building pair programming knowledge through a family of experiments. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering. (Rome, Italy, 2003), 143--153. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. NSF. 2004; www.nsf.gov/statistics/women.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Pair programming improves student retention, confidence, and program quality
Recommendations
Pair programming: what's in it for me?
ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurementPair programming is a practice in which two programmers work collaboratively at one computer on the same design, algorithm, or code. Prior research on pair programming has primarily focused on its evaluation in academic settings. There has been limited ...
Student attitudes toward pair programming
ITICSE '06: Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science educationStudents in four introductory programming classes who participated in a pair programming study had very positive attitudes toward pair programming: they liked it, thought that it was fun, would like to do it again, and believed that they learned more ...
Student attitudes toward pair programming
Students in four introductory programming classes who participated in a pair programming study had very positive attitudes toward pair programming: they liked it, thought that it was fun, would like to do it again, and believed that they learned more ...
Reviews
Ann E. Fleury
This carefully designed and controlled study investigated the effects of pair programming on hundreds of students taking an introductory programming course. A significantly higher percentage of the students who had paired took the next programming course. Students who had paired expressed significantly greater confidence in their programming solutions, and produced significantly better programs. The detail of the study that I found most surprising was that lab attendance was not mandatory; I would have expected the use of required labs to provide a way of teaching and monitoring effective pair programming. The result that I found most important was that students who paired in the introductory course were more likely to take and pass the following data structures course, where all programming assignments were done individually. I strongly recommend this paper to anyone who teaches programming courses. The study described in this paper thoroughly justifies the claims made in its title. Online Computing Reviews Service
Silvia Teresita Acuña
There is abundant literature on experiences with extreme programming (XP) processes supporting XP's effectiveness, albeit applying a selected subset rather than all of its principles (see, for example, http://www.xpuniverse.com). This paper is another contribution to the effort of gathering empirical evidence about XP. The authors compare the effects of group and lone work on student performance, and the subsequent pursuit of computer science-related degrees, among both females and males. The authors of this paper ran a quasi-experiment to analyze gender-related student retention, pass rates, confidence, and program quality, considering both pair programming and lone programming in the development of software products. Students who programmed in pairs had higher completion and continuation rates in computer science-related majors than students who programmed independently (this continuation with the major is significant for both males and females). Students who paired in the introductory programming course were more likely to attempt the subsequent programming class, and more likely to pass than students who learned to program independently. Of the students who completed the class, the paired workers produced significantly better programs than the lone workers, and pair programming enhanced developer satisfaction and confidence. By doing a gender-related analysis, this paper contributes to the debate on collateral, though very interesting, XP-related issues, such as the idea that XP can help to increase women's representation in this field. Online Computing Reviews Service
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