Author of the paper being discussed here. I'd love to study what students actually learn too! As we note in the paper, the analytical approach is a limited, ind

Author of the paper being discussed here. I'd love to study what students actually learn too! As we note in the paper, the analytical approach is a limited, indirect proxy. Unfortunately, as others have noted, doing this is intractably hard. We've reached out to dozens of coding tutorial companies, but none want to share their visitors' contact information (understandably). We've tried contacting students on our campus and others to find people who've used tutorials, but few have. If you have ideas about how to contact tutorial users, please share! The even harder problem is measuring learning. There are essentially no reliable, valid measures of any knowledge of programming (exams in courses are mostly unreliable, invalid measures). It's something we're working on in my lab, but it will take years, as it has in math and physics education. Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko