Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review

Chatbots hold the promise of revolutionizing education by engaging learners, personalizing learning activities, supporting educators, and developing deep insight into learners’ behavior. However, there is a lack of studies that analyze the recent evidence-based chatbot-learner interaction design techniques applied in education. This study presents a systematic review of 36 papers to understand, compare, and reflect on recent attempts to utilize chatbots in education using seven dimensions: educational field, platform, design principles, the role of chatbots, interaction styles, evidence, and limitations. The results show that the chatbots were mainly designed on a web platform to teach computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Further, more than half of the chatbots were used as teaching agents, while more than a third were peer agents. Most of the chatbots used a predetermined conversational path, and more than a quarter utilized a personalized learning approach that catered to students’ learning needs, while other chatbots used experiential and collaborative learning besides other design principles. Moreover, more than a third of the chatbots were evaluated with experiments, and the results primarily point to improved learning and subjective satisfaction. Challenges and limitations include inadequate or insufficient dataset training and a lack of reliance on usability heuristics. Future studies should explore the effect of chatbot personality and localization on subjective satisfaction and learning effectiveness

Advanced Technology for Engineering Education

This document contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Technology for Engineering Education, held at the Peninsula Graduate Engineering Center, Hampton, Virginia, February 24-25, 1998. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Computational Technology and NASA. Workshop attendees came from NASA, other government agencies, industry and universities. The objectives of the workshop were to assess the status of advanced technologies for engineering education and to explore the possibility of forming a consortium of interested individuals/universities for curriculum reform and development using advanced technologies. The presentations covered novel delivery systems and several implementations of new technologies for engineering education. Certain materials and products are identified in this publication in order to specify adequately the materials and products that were investigated in the research effort. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement of products by NASA, nor does it imply that the materials and products are the only ones or the best ones available for this purpose. In many cases equivalent materials and products are available and would probably produce equivalent results

Personalized content provision for virtual learning environments via the semantic web

In this paper we discuss how we may personalize e-learning along three distinct axes, namely: teaching and learning pedagogical philosophies, personalized educational processes to taste and the coordination of these processes during execution. In doing so we are concerned with supporting users' choices of educational options in course delivery via the Web services. In the work presented here, we assess the practical needs of learners and tutors and then the main research problems are analysed from a practical and pragmatic point of view. Following on from this the design of an intelligent virtual learning environment (VLE) is described to map a set of extensive didactic paradigms, which is represented by a system model and architecture. In this system, the semantic information of learning units and processes (e.g. the relationships among units) can be described and integrated in terms of various requirements of our users. As a result instructional materials with a wide variety of executional options and conditions can be built. Furthermore, through reassembling the semantics of learning content according to users' new demands, our target audience (both student and content deliverers) can change their particular educational experience dynamically. This VLE can provide high-powered pedagogy-layered personalization - thus enabling new managed e-learning Web services and applications

The guiding process in discovery hypertext learning environments for the Internet

Hypertext is the dominant method to navigate the Internet, providing user freedom and control over navigational behaviour. There has been an increase in converting existing educational material into Internet web pages but weaknesses have been identified in current WWW learning systems. There is a lack of conceptual support for learning from hypertext, navigational disorientation and cognitive overload. This implies the need for an established pedagogical approach to developing the web as a teaching and learning medium. Guided Discovery Learning is proposed as an educational pedagogy suitable for supporting WWW learning. The hypothesis is that a guided discovery environment will produce greater gains in learning and satisfaction, than a non-adaptive hypertext environment. A second hypothesis is that combining concept maps with this specific educational paradigm will provide cognitive support. The third hypothesis is that student learning styles will not influence learning outcome or user satisfaction. Thus, providing evidence that the guided discovery learning paradigm can be used for many types of learning styles. This was investigated by the building of a guided discovery system and a framework devised for assessing teaching styles. The system provided varying discovery steps, guided advice, individualistic system instruction and navigational control. An 84 subject experiment compared a Guided discovery condition, a Map-only condition and an Unguided condition. Subjects were subdivided according to learning styles, with measures for learning outcome and user satisfaction. The results indicate that providing guidance will result in a significant increase in level of learning. Guided discovery condition subjects, regardless of learning styles, experienced levels of satisfaction comparable to those in the other conditions. The concept mapping tool did not appear to affect learning outcome or user satisfaction. The conclusion was that using a particular approach to guidance would result in a more supportive environment for learning. This research contributes to the need for a better understanding of the pedagogic design that should be incorporated into WWW learning environments, with a recommendation for a guided discovery approach to alleviate major hypertext and WWW issues for distance learning

Mass production of individual feedback

Learning to program is intrinsically difficult. In addition there is a trend towards increased student diversity and larger class sizes. Student diversity increases the need for individual attention for each student, while increased class sizes decreases the amount of time a lecturer has to provide this attention. This thesis investigates an approach to help provide each student with detailed individual feedback. This feedback is important where individual attention is lacking. We used two trials to determine the effectiveness of the system. The first of these trial runs was in Autumn 2002 and the system provided the facility to the tutors to give personal and detailed feedback to each student. There was a statistically significant improvement in the weaker students’ exam results for that Semester. The system was improved for the second trial. The tutors could provide feedback as before, but also this time the students could provide feedback on each other through peer-assessment and self-assessment. The system remained popular and useful. However for the second trial we were interested in making the peer assessment aspect a success. The thesis will discuss our limited success in this area. Eighty eight percent of the students were motivated to provide feedback through bonus marks and the incentive of getting feedback from others, but many students gave absolute minimum feedback

THE ROLE OF SIMULATION IN SUPPORTING LONGER-TERM LEARNING AND MENTORING WITH TECHNOLOGY

Mentoring is an important part of professional development and longer-term learning. The nature of longer-term mentoring contexts means that designing, developing, and testing adaptive learning sys-tems for use in this kind of context would be very costly as it would require substantial amounts of fi-nancial, human, and time resources. Simulation is a cheaper and quicker approach for evaluating the impact of various design and development decisions. Within the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research community, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how to design, de-velop, and use simulations in longer-term learning contexts. The central challenge is that adaptive learning system designers and educational practitioners have limited guidance on what steps to consider when designing simulations for supporting longer-term mentoring system design and development deci-sions. My research work takes as a starting point VanLehn et al.’s [1] introduction to applications of simulated students and Erickson et al.’s [2] suggested approach to creating simulated learning envi-ronments. My dissertation presents four research directions using a real-world longer-term mentoring context, a doctoral program, for illustrative purposes. The first direction outlines a framework for guid-ing system designers as to what factors to consider when building pedagogical simulations, fundamen-tally to answer the question: how can a system designer capture a representation of a target learning context in a pedagogical simulation model? To illustrate the feasibility of this framework, this disserta-tion describes how to build, the SimDoc model, a pedagogical model of a longer-term mentoring learn-ing environment – a doctoral program. The second direction builds on the first, and considers the issue of model fidelity, essentially to answer the question: how can a system designer determine a simulation model’s fidelity to the desired granularity level? This dissertation shows how data from a target learning environment, the research literature, and common sense are combined to achieve SimDoc’s medium fidelity model. The third research direction explores calibration and validation issues to answer the question: how many simulation runs does it take for a practitioner to have confidence in the simulation model’s output? This dissertation describes the steps taken to calibrate and validate the SimDoc model, so its output statistically matches data from the target doctoral program, the one at the university of Saskatchewan. The fourth direction is to demonstrate the applicability of the resulting pedagogical model. This dissertation presents two experiments using SimDoc to illustrate how to explore pedagogi-cal questions concerning personalization strategies and to determine the effectiveness of different men-toring strategies in a target learning context. Overall, this dissertation shows that simulation is an important tool in the AIED system design-ers’ toolkit as AIED moves towards designing, building, and evaluating AIED systems meant to support learners in longer-term learning and mentoring contexts. Simulation allows a system designer to exper-iment with various design and implementation decisions in a cost-effective and timely manner before committing to these decisions in the real world

The design, implementation and evaluation of a web-based learning environment for distance education

In this study, the need was emphasised to investigate the effects of using the Web in teaching students at a distance using a multi-level evaluation framework. A Web-based learning environment was designed, developed, implemented and evaluated for this purpose. Constructivist epistemology provided the basis for developing various components and developing problem-centred and interactive activities. Management, tutorial, interaction and support components were designed to work with each other to construct the learning environment, deliver course content, facilitate interaction and monitor student progress.A methodology was designed to describe and assess the learning environment in terms of access (standardisation, speed, resources, the tutor and peers), costs (types, structure, factors influencing, etc.), teaching and learning functions (quality of course objectives, materials and resources, learning approach and student achievement), interactivity (quantity and quality of student-tutor and student-peer interaction), user-friendliness (user-interface design, ease of use and navigation design) and organisational issues. The learners were Egyptian first-grade secondary school students (32), assigned randomly, and the topic selected for the course being developed was mathematics. Feedback was obtained from both learners and experts in distance education and on-line learning during the developmental and field-testing of the learning environment. Quantitative and qualitative methods (on-line student and expert questionnaires, students' logs, performance in formative evaluation, content analysis of peer discussions, achievement test and cost-analysis) were combined to gain insights into students' satisfaction with the different instructional and technical features and capabilities of the learning environment, achievement of course objectives in comparison with conventional classroom students, factors influencing their learning and perceptions and the unit cost per student study hour.The results indicated that although the learning environment and course materials were accessible, interactive, well-structured, user-friendly and achievement was successful for the on-line group, no significant differences were identified between the on-line students and traditional classroom students in overall achievement or achievement of low-order and high-order learning objectives. In addition, it is unlikely any cost saving would be made from shifting to the Internet to deliver instruction and many major factors were found to influence the development and support costs of on-line learning