Abstract

Students must understand a problem accurately to solve it correctly Unfortunately numerous studies reported that students only have a partial understanding of the information presented in the problem description including in computer science This study assesses students task and revised-task interpretations when working on an objectoriented design problem Multiple qualitative case study research was used in this study Two male1 I Introduction and two female senior computer science students at Utah State University USA volunteered as participants They were asked to solve five programming problems while thinking aloud complete surveys and answer several interview questions The study found that the participants were able to identify most of the essential information after the initial reading of the problem description They strategically ignore detailed information that may affect their design decisions and update it throughout their problem-solving enterprise