A Design of Experiments Approach for Assessing Programming Performance in Assembly Language

Assembly language programming is an important skill required in several STEM majors. Nonetheless, it is highly regarded as challenging to teach. Several research efforts aim to make the learning process more accessible for students. Still, usually, they lack formal evaluations and experiments to determine whether the methodology of those efforts is efficacious. We are currently developing an alternative method for teaching assembly, and we would like to know if our proposal is statistically different through controlled experiments. We found several difficulties throughout the process, as there is no standard evaluation method for evaluating assembly programming proficiency, and there is a lack of experimentation for assessing different programming teaching methods. In this paper, we present our proposal on how we are using the design of experiments in our research to evaluate the effectiveness of different teaching methodologies in assembly language programs.