ICS 269, Spring 2022: Theory Seminar
Bren Hall 1423, 1:00 – 1:50


1 April 2022: Michael Shindler

Student misconceptions of dynamic programming: a replication study

In this study, we replicated and expanded the work of Zehra, Ramanathan, Zhang, and Zingary (SIGCSE 2018), which studied how well students learn dynamic programming, a notoriously difficult topic for students in a core algorithms class [Enström and Kann, TCE 2017]. The study of Zehra et al. interviewed a number of students at one university in a single term. We expanded on these results by recruiting a larger sample size of students, over several terms, in both large public and private universities as well as liberal arts colleges. Our aim was to investigate whether the results of Zehra et al. generalized to other universities and also to larger groups of students.