dehnadi

But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis (Dehnadi, 2009).

The original study is Testing Programming Aptitude, by Saeed Dehnadi in 2006.

From the abstract: I continue to believe, however, that Dehnadi had uncovered the first evidence of an important phenomenon in programming learners.

Saeed Dehnadi and Richard have done some interesting work on...

I’m fairly sure that I believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn’t learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it.

Several subsequent experiments (Dehnadi, 2009; Dehnadi et al., 2009; Bornat et al., 2012) confirmed, at least, that the aptitude test consistently produces two humps.

I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.

The only numbers I've seen come from the Separating Programming Sheep From Non-Programming Goats papers by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat: > We have discovered a test which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats.

The Bornat & Dehnadi Goats & Sheep paper is interesting in showing that we can diagnose students who have significant misconceptions or lack of knowledge needed to learn programming (see similar research on concept inventories showing the same thing in a wealth of other subject areas).

What do you think "But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis" means?

In Saeed Dehnadi's article "The camel has two humps", it's mentioned that there are three great filters in programming pedagogy: * assignment/sequence * recursion * concurrency.

The study you are thinking of is "The Camel Has Two Humps" by Dehnadi and Bornat, which was never officially published (and having read it, has several control issues that are cause for concern with respect to internal validity).

It's a bit more complicated than "debunked/retracted", as that second document explains: > Dehnadi, to his credit, stuck to his guns and did the meta-analysis that showed that he’d discovered a phenomenon and that his test was a worthwhile predictor.

Dehnadi & Bornat (2006) was the seminal two-hump paper, which was widely circulated but never peer reviewed.

Dehnadi seems to have gotten caught in the crossfire, since his paper was retracted for extra-textual reasons.

It’s notable evidence of my level of derangement: it was a palpably false claim, as Dehnadi’s data at the time showed.