Reading Behavior and Comprehension of C plus plus Source Code - A Classroom Study

This paper presents an eye-tracking study conducted in a classroom setting with seventeen students enrolled in a Computer Science program. The students were a mix of twelve first-year undergraduates (novices) and five masters students (non-novices). Students were asked to answer a comprehension question for each of thirteen C++ programs after reading them. Each program is split into a series of chunks which logically break down meaningful parts where eye gazes hint at cognition about parts of programs useful to solving problems. We analyze these patterns across chunks for the stories they tell about how participants went about searching for cues, and to learn whether their gaze patterns predicted accurate answers to three types of questions The results show that novices tend to visit print output statements and declaration statements the same amount as they do other statements in code with the exception of control block headers, which both groups tend to focus on the most across all categories. We also find that non-novices spend longer fixating inside of chunks of code before transitioning to other chunks, and tend to transition to chunks that are further away from their original position than novices.