The Relationship Between Voluntary Practice of Short Programming Exercises and Exam Performance

Learning to program can be challenging. Many instructors use drill-and-practice strategies to help students develop basic programming techniques and improve their confidence. Online systems that provide short programming exercises with immediate, automated feedback are seeing more frequent use in this regard. However, the relationship between practicing with short programming exercises and performance on larger programming assignments or exams are unclear. This paper describes an evaluation of short programming questions in the context of a CS1 course where they were used on both homework assignments, for practice and learning, and on exams, for assessing individual performance. The open-source drill-and-practice system used here provides for full feedback during practice exercises. During exams, it allows limiting feedback to compiler errors and to a very small number of example inputs shown in the question, instead of the more complete feedback received during practice. Using data collected from 200 students in a CS1 course, we examine the relationship between voluntary practice on short exercises and subsequent performance on exams, while using an early exam as a control for individual differences including ability level. Results indicate that, after controlling for ability, voluntary practice does contribute to improved performance on exams, but that motivation to improve may also be important.