Empirical Definition of Object-oriented Programming Competencies

International large-scale educational investigations and the focus on learners' competencies powered a veritable revolution in teaching and learning approaches as well as in educational research methodologies. In the relatively young field of computer science education research, however, there is a considerable lack of empirical studies on the definition and measurement of competencies. The central goal of the presented research project is to identify, describe, and measure competencies for object-oriented programming, in particular for implementing abstract data types. We use an automated assessment system to evaluate and score a large number of students' solutions of programming tasks. Item Response Theory analyses of the results identify subsets of tasks suitable for defining typical programming competencies. Further qualitative analyses reveal the internal structure of the competencies and allow a classification in a competency structure model. This article presents in detail our rigorous methodology and exemplary results for the empirical definition and decomposition of the competency named "Ability to implement the abstract data type Binary Search Tree"

Modelling competencies for computing education beyond 2020: a research based approach to defining competencies in the computing disciplines.

How might the content and outcomes of tertiary education programmes be described and analysed in order to understand how they are structured and function? To address this question we develop a framework for modelling graduate competencies linked to tertiary degree programmes in the computing disciplines. While the focus of our work is computing the framework is applicable to education more broadly. The work presented here draws upon the pioneering curricular document for information technology (IT2017), curricular competency frameworks, other related documents such as the software engineering competency model (SWECOM), the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), current research in competency models, and elicitation workshop results from recent computing conferences. The aim is to inform the ongoing Computing Curricula (CC2020) project, an endeavour supported by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society. We develop the Competency Learning Framework (CoLeaF), providing an internationally relevant tool for describing competencies. We argue that this competency based approach is well suited for constructing learning environments and assists degree programme architects in dealing with the challenge of developing, describing and including competencies relevant to computer and IT professionals. In this paper we demonstrate how the CoLeaF competency framework can be applied in practice, and though a series of case studies demonstrate its effectiveness and analytical power as a tool for describing and comparing degree programmes in the international higher education landscape