Students’ Understandings of Storing Objects

This paper reports a phenomenographic study of how introductory students view objects that have been created and stored by an object-oriented program. By analyzing student interviews, we identify five categories of description, each representing a different kind of understanding of the phenomenon. Of these categories, some represent viable understandings that we would like our students to have. Others are partially incorrect and indicate that some students mistakenly focus their awareness on aspects that are unhelpful or even harmful for constructing a viable mental model of storing objects. This paper brings together two previously disjointed branches of computer science education research: the study of misconceptions and the phenomenographic research approach. The phenomenographic approach used in this study extends traditional phenomenography by including partially incorrect understandings in a phenomenographic outcome space, and explicitly treating them as such. This approach offers a new way of studying misconceptions and linking them to correct understandings of a phenomenon.