A basic recursion concept inventory

Abstract

Recursion is both an important and a difficult topic for introductory Computer Science students. Students often develop misconceptions about the topic that need to be diagnosed and corrected. In this paper, we report on our initial attempts to develop a concept inventory that measures student misconceptions on basic recursion topics. We present a collection of misconceptions and difficulties encountered by students when learning introductory recursion as presented in a typical CS2 course. Based on this collection, a draft concept inventory in the form of a series of questions was developed and evaluated, with the question rubric tagged to the list of misconceptions and difficulties.

Keywords:

• Recursion
• concept inventory
• misconceptions

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from the VT-MENA program of Egypt, and the National Science Foundation [grant number DUE-0836940], [grant number DUE-0937863], [grant number DUE-0840719].