VISUALIZATION QUALITY

(Under the Direction of Eileen Kraemer) Program Visualization refers to the graphical representation of a program in execution. They are used to facilitate better understanding of the underlying algorithm or other program behavior. However, doubts exist about the usefulness of program visualizations and the extent to which the visualizations are employed in practice [6]. Some studies of program and algorithm visualizations have shown that visualizations have helped the instructional effort [17, 6], while others argue that they have little or no effect on the learning of subjects [19, 21]. Explaining the discrepancy is part of the research to be carried out. One theory is that the quality of the program visualization used has varied among experiments. An experiment generation application called TestCreator has been developed to design experiments that assist in identification of the attributes associated with program visualization quality and quantification of the effects of these attributes on the ability of visualizations to facilitate learning