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The semi-infamous paper "The Camel Has Two Humps" remains a pretty interesting study on teaching programming. It's not exactly what you're asking about, but it has relevance in terms of identifying cognitive patterns that are tied to good comprehension of software.

It has been retracted, but the retraction applies only to the grander claims made based on the results. The experimental results have been replicated several times, and to my knowledge have not failed replication in meaningful ways. (One study, for instance, found "no effect" because the cohort scored ~100% on the assessment questions, which means any useful variance was above the test ceiling.)

You can find the paper here (http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20t...), a good-if-overzealous discussion here (https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...) and the pseudo-retraction here (http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...).




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