Search Results

Computer Science (CS) Unplugged activities are designed to engage students with CS concepts. It is an active learning approach combining physical interaction with visual representation. This research article investigates the impact of CS Unplugged on ...

Researching students’ conceptions in computer science education (CSEd) is a recent and growing field. Until now the most studies are only focused on uncovering students’ conceptions without taking any further steps. However, according to conceptual ...

Since students are familiar with machine learning (ML)-based applications in their everyday lives, they already construct mental models of how these systems work. This can result in misconceptions that influence the learning of correct ML concepts. ...

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component ...

With the growing use of temporal logics in areas ranging from robot planning to runtime verification, it is critical that users have a clear understanding of what a specification means. Toward this end, we have been developing a catalog of ...

Teachers who are aware of potential student misconceptions teach better than teachers who do not. In this article, we focus on misconceptions in the context of teaching and learning graph algorithms: we seek to discover student misconceptions about ...

Misconceptions about core linguistic concepts like mutable variables, mutable compound data, and their interaction with scope and higher-order functions seem to be widespread. But how do we detect them, given that experts have blind spots and may not ...

Previous work has mostly investigated the top errors made by novice Java and Python learners to explore enhancing error messages, manifestation of misconceptions, or inform instructor decisions. We build on this work by analyzing anonymized data from ...

The focus of my research is the identification and explanation of common misconceptions of students in introductory programming courses about control structures and data structures. In my previous work I have identified several difficulties with for-...

While learning new subjects, students often develop misconceptions that affect their results and even their academic success. Concept inventories (CIs) – collections of multiple-choice questions – are widely used instruments for spotting ...

Teaching students to develop code of good quality is important. Refactoring -- rewriting a program into a semantically equivalent program of better quality -- is a common technique to improve code quality. It is therefore relevant for students to learn ...

Extensive prior work has identified and described misconceptions held by novice programmers. Much of this prior work has involved at least some automatic detection of potential misconceptions using a variety of methods such as intercepting compiler error ...

Understanding data flow and tracing the values of variables across a program is an essential skill for reading and comprehending program code. Two major hurdles in tracing variable values are variable (re)assignment and scopes with parameter passing and ...

In this article, we report results from a randomized controlled trial where novice programmers completed code mimicking exercises -- writing and modifying code shown to them -- designed to help learn the basics of how variables work. Using a tailored ...

Recursion is a fundamental concept in computer science education, but many students struggle to understand its underlying principles and common implementation strategies. This study aims to investigate the most common misconceptions that novice students ...

In this paper we advocate the study of misconceptions in the formal methods domain by integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. In this domain, so far, misconceptions have mostly been studied with qualitative methods, typically via interviews ...

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL ...

Student conceptions about program “efficiency” shape their approach to programming and problem-solving. However, we know very little about the kinds of conceptions students have on entry into post-secondary education. In this paper we present the result ...

A concept inventory (CI) is a standardized assessment tool designed to evaluate a student's understanding of the fundamental concepts of a topic. To create a CI, it is necessary to accurately identify these concepts, but also to identify how poorly ...

Background and Context.

Modern programming is replete with features like closures, callbacks, generators, asynchronous functions, and so on. These features can be subtle in their behavior and interaction with the rest of the language, so students need ...