I can't give you a direct link to such an article, although I can do a bit more and less. Five years I was writing such an article, although sadly I got side-tracked by other activities, I still have the rough outline that I was working on. From there I can give you a list of keywords / some seed articles to read in the area that you can snowball from to find more relevant material.
Keywords: CS1, cognitive approaches, curricular planning, programming, difficulties, learning, novices, programming, teaching, student retention.
Articles:
* SIGCSE Bull. A cognitive approach to identifying measurable milestones for programming skill acquisition. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1189136.1189185
* IJ of Man-Machine Studies. "Novices and Programming" by Soloway and Spohrer (Book Review). 1993
* Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Studying the Novice Programmer. 1989 (Soloway, E. and Spohrer, J. C.
* ITiCSE '05. A study of the difficulties of novice programmers. 2005. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1067445.1067453
* Using Alice in Overview Courses to Improve Success Rates in Programming I. Johnsgard, Karin and McDonald, James. 10.1109/CSEET.2008.35
* ITiCSE '03. Using lab exams to ensure programming practice in an introductory programming course. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/961511.961519
* SIGCSE. Constructivism in computer science education. Mordechai Ben-Ari. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/273133.274308.
* Signs. Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture. Turkle, Sherry and Papert, Seymour. 1990. http://www.thinkingcurriculum.com/turklePapert.pdf
Based on your question I would recommend the last two articles as the most interesting. It's been a long time since I read the Turkle article but I recall that it is the most relevant to understanding why we observe this behaviour, and the Ben-Ari article is a comprehensive framework to wrap that understanding within.
Although I never finished the article (fairly typical academic story :) I did write the software / courses that used it and tried it out successfully for five years. I can't give you a link to the software / results for fairly boring reasons to do with IP and confidentiality, but my overall view was that we can build learning experiences that can be successfully accessed by both types of student - but the level of polish and integration that is required to pull it off is about an order of magnitude greater than what is typically invested in undergraduate education. Obviously there is such a huge variation in the effort that goes into individual courses that such an observation is only relevant to a similar institution / student group at a particular point in time.
