Insights into students' conceptual understanding of operating systems: a four-year case study in online education

For decades, instructors and researchers have been trying to improve or enhance the learning process of students. In this process, it is important to know whether students have misconceptions in their conceptual understanding. The study of these elements is becoming a relevant research area in science and engineering education. This article provides insights into why students have misconceptions in an online course on operating systems. Specifically, this study presents a four-year qualitative case study of 78 online students in order to identify misconceptions and the causes that generate them. Our results indicate that students experienced misconceptions with the concept of interrupt. In fact, this study reveals that the natural-language meaning of the term interrupt is a hindrance to understanding this concept. In addition, a methodology for discovering misconceptions and their causes is developed

A Systematic Map for Improving Teaching and Learning in Undergraduate Operating Systems Courses

Operating Systems (OS) is an important area of knowledge included in virtually allundergraduate computing curricula and in some engineering curricula as well. Teaching and learning anOS undergraduate course have always been a challenge. Several different approaches have been used for OSteaching and learning. Nevertheless, it is not easy for a teacher to choose one of them. No guidelines areavailable on how to choose one of them to match the specific objectives of each OS course. The objective ofthis paper is to analyze the approaches that have been used to improve OS teaching and learning by applyinga systematic map. In particular, we consider the following dimensions: learning objectives, assessment,empirical study, methodology, and mode (face-to-face, online, or blended). The systematic map devisedin this paper is focused on the time span from 1995 to 2017 and considered six of the major publicationson the Computer Science Education. We considered three journals (theJournal of Engineering Education,the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ONEDUCATION, and theInternational Journal of Engineering Education) and threeconferences (the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education—SIGCSE, the Conferenceon Computing Education Research—ITiCSE, and the International Conference on Computing EducationResearch—Koli). A total of 55 papers were included in the study after performing a search based on theinclusion/exclusion criteria. Nine approaches to improve OS teaching and learning were identified andanalyzed. Furthermore, the implications for OS instructors and for research in this field are discussed.2018-1

Computer Science Concept Inventories: Past and Future

Concept Inventories (CIs) are assessments designed to measure student learning of core concepts. CIs have become well known for their major impact on pedagogical techniques in other sciences, especially physics. Presently, there are no widely used, validated CIs for computer science. However, considerable groundwork has been performed in the form of identifying core concepts, analyzing student misconceptions, and developing CI assessment questions. Although much of the work has been focused on CS1 and a CI has been developed for digital logic, some preliminary work on CIs is underway for other courses. This literature review examines CI work in other STEM disciplines, discusses the preliminary development of CIs in computer science, and outlines related research in computer science education that contributes to CI development

Developing A Pre- And Post-Course Concept Inventory To Gauge Operating Systems Learning

Operating systems courses often present students with multiple approaches to solve a problem, often with differing trade-offs. While students are more than capable of memorizing the details of these competing approaches, they often struggle to recommend a specific approach and analyze its implications. In particular, we find that students exhibit difficultly in interpreting text-based scenario descriptions in a way that allows them to correctly choose between potential solutions when presented with a high-level, conceptual scenario. In this paper, we describe the development of a pre- and post-course concept inventory, which we utilize to explore students\u27 misconceptions of operating systems and their associated trade-offs. We compare the results of our assessment with in-class peer instruction questions and exam questions to characterize the areas in which students most commonly struggle with operating systems material