Author of the paper being discussed here. Re: self-sufficiency, our evidence agrees. You might be interested in this paper from my lab, which successfully attempts to teach self-regulation skills to novices:
Loksa, D., Ko, A. J., Jernigan, W., Oleson, A., Mendez, C. J., & Burnett, M. M. (2016, May). Programming, problem solving, and self-awareness: effects of explicit guidance. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1449-1461). ACM.
http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Loksa2016Programmi...
Thanks for the link I'm just reading your paper now, using Cloud9 IDE is an interesting choice which I am not sure is beneficial to the learners..
I think self-sufficiency should include building a local environment you can work work in without having to rely on some SAAS / Cloud service based IDE.
Loksa, D., Ko, A. J., Jernigan, W., Oleson, A., Mendez, C. J., & Burnett, M. M. (2016, May). Programming, problem solving, and self-awareness: effects of explicit guidance. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1449-1461). ACM. http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Loksa2016Programmi...
Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko