In higher education, quality feedback for students is regarded as one of the main contributors to improve student learning. Feedback to support students' development into self-regulated learners, who set their own goals, self-monitor their actual performance according to these goals, and adjust learning strategies if necessary, is seen as an…

Compared to other subjects, the typical introductory programming (CS1) course has higher than usual rates of both failing and high grades, creating a characteristic bimodal grade distribution. In this article, I explore two possible explanations. The conventional explanation has been that learners naturally fall into populations of programmers and…