The global shortage of skilled programmers remains a persistent challenge. High dropout rates in introductory programming courses pose a significant obstacle to graduation. Previous studies highlighted learning difficulties in programming students, but their specific weaknesses remained unclear. This gap exists due to the predominant focus on the…

Presents a probabilistic technique to retrieve passages from texts having a large size or heterogeneous semantic content. Results of experiments comparing the probabilistic technique to one based on a text segmentation algorithm revealed that the passage size affects passage retrieval performance; text organization and query generality may have an…