Background and Context: Auto-graders are praised by novice students learning to program, as they provide them with automatic feedback about their problem-solving process. However, some students often make random changes when they have errors in their code, without engaging in deliberate thinking about the cause of the error. Objective: To…

The study investigates the potential of anxiety clusters in predicting programming performance in two distinct coding environments. Participants comprised 83 second-year programming students who were randomly assigned to either a block-based or a text-based group. Anxiety-induced behaviors were assessed using physiological measures (Apple Watch…