Teaching the software engineers of the future to write code of good style, structure, and quality is important. However, there is little known about how to teach these topics to novice learners, and how effective these interventions are. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify which instructional approaches have been tried to teach students about the structure of their code. We identified the goals of these approaches, what the researchers measured to assess their effectiveness, and how effective the approaches were.

By building on an existing mapping study of code quality in education, we identified 51 papers that discuss an instructional approach, including specific exercises, rubrics, and activities. Many approaches revolve around digital tools that point students to problems in their code, or help them with fixing such problems. We identified that several of these approaches were designed for education, but their effectiveness was often not tested. Our findings provide a first overview of instructional approaches to teach novices about improving the structure of their code, calling for the design of more diverse materials and conducting experiments to gather more evidence on their effectiveness.