49 undergraduate students working independently on a small project over the course of a single week using a previously unseen language with no consideration of the performance or maintainability of the resulting code. I can't see how there are any meaningful conclusions to be drawn from this study other than "inexperienced programmers find learning new dynamically typed languages easier".
Not at all. When learning any new programming language there's going to be a period where you're working by trial and error. Removing compile-time typing generally means less syntax to learn which makes the feedback loop tighter which I would imagine gets you the point of familiarity quicker. The study seems to back that idea, but not much more.
