Teaching Well-Structured Code: A Literature Review of Instructional Approaches

What is it about?

This study conducts a systematic review of the field of code quality to understand which instructional approaches have been studied for teaching function-level code structure (semantic style) to students and how researchers measured the effectiveness of their interventions.

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Why is it important?

This review identifies 53 studies that either "described an instructional approach in detail" or provided resources "potentially useful for educational purposes". The most common approach, discussed in 36 studies, focused on supportive tools that automatically detect code structure violations and provide feedback to students. However, this approach has many limitations, including that existing code analyzers are not context-aware, their feedback often is not well-studied, and this approach only supports students in refactoring, overlooking other related skills---e.g., identification of well-structured code or code comprehension. An additional 15 studies examined the use of instructional materials, such as rubrics, refactoring lessons, exercises, or catalogs of common violations from prior research. Only two studies proposed a more comprehensive integration of code structure instruction into the broader curriculum. The review highlights each of these instructional strategies as examples for instructors. Notably, we found that nearly half of the studies describing instructional approaches did not evaluate their effectiveness with students. These findings underscore the need for more research on evidence-based and diverse methods for teaching code structure.