Mahmood, M. S., & Chen, H., & Fong, M., & Herman, G. (2022, August), Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40679

\bibitem{asee_peer_40679}
  Mahmood, M. S., \& Chen, H., \& Fong, M., \& Herman, G. (2022, August), \emph{Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories}
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
  10.18260/1-2--40679

Muhammad Suleman Mahmood, Hongxuan Chen, Morgan Fong, and Geoffrey Herman.  "Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories".  2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/40679 Internet.  16 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_40679}
  Muhammad Suleman Mahmood, Hongxuan Chen, Morgan Fong, and Geoffrey Herman.
  "Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/40679 Internet.  16 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_40679
author = "Muhammad Suleman Mahmood, Hongxuan Chen, Morgan Fong, and Geoffrey Herman"
title = "Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories"
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2022"
month = "August"
address = "Minneapolis, MN"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/40679}
number = {10.18260/1-2--40679}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Memory is an important part of computer systems. It is a performance bottleneck for many applications. To get maximum performance from the memory system, programmers need to know how caches work and what data access patterns lead to better performance. Caches also play an important role in computer security. Caches are recognized as one of the most difficult topics in Computer Architecture courses. Our earlier investigations indicated that students struggle particularly in mapping data to cache and in keeping track of that state of set-associative caches and their replacement policies. In this paper we describe our ongoing exploration of the methods that students use to map data to cache and to track replacement polices for set associative caches. We also investigate the misconceptions that hinder the students in successfully accomplishing these tasks. We believe that this investigation will help us in designing representations and tools to help students develop a better understanding of caches.

We conducted a series of 10 think-aloud interviews in Spring 2020 semester. The students were asked to solve three questions about mapping data to cache and two questions about tracking least recently used replacement policy for set-associative caches. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed by a research team consisting of four members using constant comparative method to form our hypotheses. Constant comparative method is derived from grounded theory. It requires that the researchers constantly compare new data with emerging theories and prior data. This paper describes the motivation, research questions, data collection and analysis methodology that we have followed in our study along with our initial results.

Our preliminary findings indicate that students assume sequential access in mapping data to cache even when there is no access pattern mentioned in the questions. Our analysis showed misconceptions about how data is cached in the cache blocks. For tracking the state of the cache, students tend to ignore the replacement policy while placing data in a set-associative cache. A common observed pattern is that students go back to the beginning to recompute the state of the cache when students realize the need for the replacement policy rather than actively tracking least recently used state of the cache. 

Some of our observations have limited support in the collected data. We are in the process of collecting more data to test our emerging hypotheses. The additional data will be analyzed through the same process.
AU  - Muhammad Suleman Mahmood
AU  - Hongxuan Chen
AU  - Morgan Fong
AU  - Geoffrey Herman
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Work in Progress: Exploring Students' Misconceptions of Cache Memories
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/40679
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--40679
ER  -