What do you know, I talk about applying the last paper to debugging and this paper addresses it. I must be in sync with Elliot Soloway or something. In any case, I thought that this article was interesting because it addressed why there are common mistakes and the fact that it is most likely a result of lack of acknowledgement that they keep occuring. However, because the paper dealt with more procedural issues, I had a slightly harder time relating it to my experience.

On hours I have found that most people do not get caught up in little syntax issues. In the beginning they may not know how to do something, and sometimes there are bugs because people messed up the syntax, but generally it is a careless mistake as opposed to a sign of obvious misunderstanding of the material. Other bugs have dealt with concepts but they are programming concepts more than solving a problem, such as null pointers and local vs. instance variables.

So once again, I think that this is an issue that is very important for the TA's and the professor. A lot of research needs to be done into the specific concepts that cause trouble for people, so that we can focus on ways to get those ideas across.