There are many paradigms available to address the unique and complex problems introduced with parallel programming. These complexities have implications for computer science education as ubiquitous multi-core computers drive the need for programmers to understand parallelism. One major obstacle to student learning of parallel programming is that there is very little human factors evidence comparing the different techniques to one another, so there is no clear direction on which techniques should be taught and how. We performed a randomized controlled trial using 88 university-level computer science student participants performing three identical tasks to examine the question of whether or not there are measurable differences in programming performance between two paradigms for concurrent programming: threads compared to process-oriented programming based on Communicating Sequential Processes. We measured both time on task and programming accuracy using an automated token accuracy map (TAM) technique. Our results showed trade-offs between the paradigms using both metrics and the TAMs provided further insight about specific areas of difficulty in comprehension.

中文翻译：

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使用新的测量技术分析学生在并行编程中的表现的随机对照试验

有许多范例可用于解决并行编程引入的独特而复杂的问题。这些复杂性对计算机科学教育产生了影响，因为无处不在的多核计算机推动了程序员理解并行性的需求。学生学习并行编程的一个主要障碍是几乎没有人为因素的证据来比较不同的技术，因此对于应该教授哪些技术以及如何教授这些技术没有明确的方向。我们使用 88 名大学计算机科学专业的学生参与者进行了一项随机对照试验，他们执行了三项相同的任务，以检查两种并发编程范式之间的编程性能是否存在可测量差异的问题：线程与基于通信顺序进程的面向进程的编程相比。我们使用自动令牌准确度图 (TAM) 技术测量了任务时间和编程准确度。我们的结果显示了使用这两种指标的范式之间的权衡，而 TAM 提供了有关理解困难的特定领域的进一步见解。