Introductory Programming courses facilitate the understanding of the fundamental concepts of programming. Inability to address errors while programming can lead novices to lose interest, making the deliberate introduction of common code errors—alongside strategies to increase motivation and confidence — a key element in supporting their comprehension in programming courses. Formative assessment is one of the approaches for effective programming learning. Most programming education research focuses on either formative assessment or adaptive learning, but not on the intersection. Inspired by this approach, this study proposes the use of adaptive formative assessment as a pedagogical intervention to enhance student confidence and support learning in Introductory Programming courses. This study introduces an adaptive formative assessment framework that leverages common programming errors as structured learning opportunities. This approach is novel in that it employs a progressive mechanism for assessing and providing feedback on independent programming skills, dynamically adapting question difficulty according to the nature and recurrence of learner errors. This study investigated how effectively these assessments helped students understand, learn and develop a sense of their ability to program computer programs by introducing common programming errors. It investigated the impact of adaptive formative assessment over novices’ self-confidence on their comprehension of fundamental programming concepts and their capacity to recognise and correct common errors in programming after engaging with the quizzes. Findings from students’ self-rated surveys and analysis techniques indicate that novice students’ self-confidence and comprehension of independent programming concepts have significantly increased as a result of the use of difficulty-based adaptive strategies and the introduction of numerous errors in a formative assessment. This study also found that there was a statistically significant difference between the pre and post self-confident values, test scores and completion time. This demonstrates how adaptive formative assessment helps novices learn programming and this approach would be recommended to others working in the field of computer science education.