The number of executed program statements was
counted as the total number of statements executed for
the complete tracing task. This count, if a selection or
iterative statement is included in the code, is dependent on the data provided as the input for the specific tracing
task.
These dynamic metrics provide a measurement of the
execution complexity of the code. It seems reasonable to
include such metrics because when students are tracing
code they are hand executing the code and, from an initial
input, processing data through the code line by line via
the relevant paths of the code in order to determine the
output. We postulate that these metrics will correlate well
with the difficulty of the tracing tas