In Qian's first passage(2014), I have explored many common mistakes and misconceptions in functions, such as incorrect use of the return statement and value returned. I think knowing students' common mistakes is valuable to analyze students' work, so we can provide a more precise comment on their work. A big take-away for me is from Qian's(2020) second article. It mentioned that misconceptions that do not immediately lead to an explicit Python error message or produce no error messages at all are also important! Because those misconceptions are not easy to find immediately, and also are not immediately observed by teachers.
This definitely will be helpful to employ to help you to continually reflect on my own understanding and perceptions, because as a non-computer-science-major teacher, I am not familiar with those common mistakes, so those common mistakes can help me get a variety of examples of students' misconceptions with research-based data. That will help me survive the first several times of teaching because I haven't taught anything like this before. In addition, it gives me a heads up on the possible understanding error even though the error message may not occur. It teaches me how I should read students' work and analyze the possible errors, and indicate current or potential misconceptions.
The question I have is, how to I keep a balance between scaffolding and letting students figure it out on their own, in the instruction?
reference
Qian, Y. (2014). Functions – Student Misconceptions and Challenges. Pd4cs.org. Retrieved from https://www.pd4cs.org/functions-student-misconceptions-and-challenges/ (*If it cues you to create a user account, you can open a private or incognito window and view the content.)
Qian, Y., Hambrusch, S., Yadav, A., & Gretter, S. (2020). Teachers’ perceptions of student misconceptions in introductory programming. Baywood Publishing Company. doi:10.1177/0735633119845413
Hazzan O., Lapidot T., Ragonis N. (2014) Integrated view at the MTCS Course organization: The case of recursion. In: Guide to Teaching Computer Science. Springer, London