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

Providing computer-assisted, two-way feedback in formative assessment: an innovation supporting best educational practice

This thesis presents the design and development of an educational ICT innovation called the Quality Assessment System (QAS), intended to: increase the speed of providing useful, legible and consistent feedback, enhance student engagement in the analysis and improvement of their own work, and provide an easily-accessible, cumulative history of completed tasks and feedback. The QAS has been developed to a proof-of-concept stage as a Microsoft Word add-in, which can be used on digital or handwritten work, and has functions to administer resubmissions. The prototype system was evaluated at a tertiary institution in the field of English for Speakers of Other Languages. I used observations, interview methods, and a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to simulate full use of the software. The research found that: - the QAS could foster the rapid provision of consistent, clear feedback; - the facility to provide digital feedback on handwritten work safeguarded the desire of some students to continue writing their tasks by hand; - the handling of resubmitted tasks and the comparison of feedback on the first and second submissions (or any other pair of user-selected tasks) was considered very useful; - some students were emotional attached to handwritten feedback and believed that feedback mediated by computer showed a lack of teacher care for the students; - administrators believed the QAS would be useful for resolving student-teacher disputes, and as a tool to enhance the robustness of the quality self-assessment system the faculty adhered to. While I acknowledge the need for caution in interpreting the fieldwork results of small samples, this research places systemisation tools such as the QAS firmly on the agenda for closer investigation

The Impact of Lecture Attendance on Exams for Novice Programming Students

In this paper, the correlation between lecture attendance and assessment tasks on final exam performance of introductory programming students has been analyzed to identify if lecture attendance, and completion of in-class and take home formative assessment tasks affects student performance in the final examination. In this study, only lecture attendance, homework exercises and class demonstration scores, and final exam marks have been considered. This study used Spearman&#39;s Rank correlation coefficient and multiple regression techniques via SPSS software to analyze the student data of the academic years 2012, 2013 and 2014 of an introductory programming course to test the hypotheses. It is found that, there is a significant correlation between homework exercises and final exam scores. However, formal lecture attendance and final exam performance were negatively correlated. Moreover, multiple regression results of assessment tasks such as homework exercises, class activities and lecture attendance on final exam scores, did not provide any significant value to support the statement &quot;Marks achieved in homework, class demonstrations, and lecture attendance, have a significant positive impact on final examination results&quot;.</p

Toward More Motivating Classrooms: A Study of the Relationship Between Autonomy-Supportive Course Design Features and Autonomous Learner Motivation

This dissertation is an exploratory study of the impact on motivation of using autonomy-supportive course design features across a broad range of social science courses at the University of Michigan. The primary goal of this dissertation is to explore how variation in the employment of autonomy-supportive course design features affects the degree to which students internalize their motivation to do well in that course. Broadly, autonomy-supportive course design features are ways that instructors can design a course to give students more ownership over their learning, reduce the cost of failure, provide constructive feedback, and in general allow students’ perspectives to guide the way they interact with the course. The results from this study will ideally inform the way that autonomy-supportive course design is used in gameful courses, but will also be useful for course design in general. By studying autonomy-supportive course design outside of gameful courses I attempt to isolate the effects of autonomy-supportive course design from other features of gameful courses as well as student reactions to the novelty of gameful grading systems. In addition, I consider individual differences as potential moderators of the relationship between autonomy-supportive course design and student autonomous motivation. While there were no main effects of autonomy-supportive course design features on student autonomous motivation, there are significant interactions suggesting that different students react differently to certain autonomy-supportive course design features. Students may not perceive choice in the same way and these perceptions are influenced by student individual differences. Results indicate that higher achieving students were more adept at managing the additional responsibility of choice and thus approached the use of autonomy-supportive course design from a more autonomous perspective than lower achieving students. Students who perceived a low cost of engaging with a course, relative to students who perceived a high cost, tended to also approach autonomy-supportive course design from a more autonomous perspective since they had more time to manage that increased responsibility. One implication of these results for courses that utilize autonomy-supportive course design, including gameful courses, is that instructors should consider providing additional scaffolding to help students adapt to the novel course design elements. The goal of gameful pedagogy is to use the design elements of video games (not the games themselves) to re-design the grading system in a course in order to boost intrinsic motivation. Autonomy-supportive course design is one facet of gameful pedagogy alongside safe failure, and holistic backwards design (Holman, 2018). Self-Determination Theory researchers have found that well-designed video games are intrinsically motivating for players because they satisfy players’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski, 2006; Przybylski, Rigby, & Ryan, 2010; Przybylski, Weinstein, Ryan, & Rigby, 2009). The intrinsically motivating nature of well-designed video games is the driver behind the study of the use of game design elements in other contexts, such as education. Limitations of the current study and potential future directions for research are discussed in the final chapter. This exploratory study of autonomy-supportive course design reveals much about the way that different students perceived autonomy-supportive course design features and raises important implications for the use of autonomy-supportive course design in gameful courses.PHDEducation & PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149962/1/bdplum_1.pd

Mining Student Submission Information to Refine Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism is becoming an increasingly important issue in introductory programming courses. There are several tools to assist with plagiarism detection, but they are not effective for more basic programming assignments, like those in introductory courses. The proliferation of auto-grading platforms creates an opportunity to capture additional information about how students develop the solutions to their programming assignments. In this research, we identify how to extract information from an online autograding platform, Mimir Classroom, that can be useful in revealing patterns in solution development. We explore how and to what extent this additional information can be used to better support instructors when identifying cases of probable plagiarism. We have developed a tool that takes the raw student assignment submissions from Mimir, analyzes them, and produces data sets and visualizations that help instructors to refine information extracted by existing plagiarism detection platforms. The instructors can then take this information to further investigate any probable cases of plagiarism that have been found by the tool. Our main goal is to give insight into student behaviors and identify signals that can be effective indicatives of plagiarism. Furthermore, the framework can enable the analysis of other aspects of students’ solution development processes that may be useful when reasoning about their learning. As an initial exploration scenario of the framework developed in this work, we have used student code submissions from the CSCE 121: Introduction to Program Design and Concepts course at Texas A&M University. We experimented with the student code submissions from the Fall 2018 and Fall 2019 offerings of the course

Efficient Use of Teaching Technologies with Programming Education

Learning and teaching programming are challenging tasks that can be facilitated by using different teaching technologies. Visualization systems are software systems that can be used to help students in forming proper mental models of executed program code. They provide different visual and textual cues that help student in abstracting the meaning of a program code or an algorithm. Students also need to constantly practice the skill of programming by implementing programming assignments. These can be automatically assessed by other computer programs but parts of the evaluation need to be assessed manually by teachers or teaching assistants.There are a lot of existing tools that provide partial solutions to the practical problems of programming courses: visualizing program code, assessing student programming submissions automatically or rubrics that help keeping manual assessment consistent. Taking these tools into use is not straightforward. To succeed, the teacher needs to find the suitable tools and properly integrate them into the course infrastructure supporting the whole learning process. As many programming courses are mass courses, it is a constant struggle between providing sufficient personal guidance and feedback while retaining a reasonable workload for the teacher.This work answers to the question "How can the teaching of programming be effectively assisted using teaching technologies?" As a solution, different learning taxonomies are presented from Computer Science perspective and applied to visualization examples so the examples could be used to better support deeper knowledge and the whole learning process within a programming course. Then, different parts of the assessment process of programming assignments are studied to find the best practices in supporting the process, especially when multiple graders are being used, to maintain objectivity, consistency and reasonable workload in the grading.The results of the work show that teaching technologies can be a valuable aid for the teacher to support the learning process of the students and to help in the practical organization of the course without hindering the learning results or personalized feedback the students receive from their assignments. This thesis presents new visualization categories that allow deeper cognitive development and examples on how to integrate them efficiently into the course infrastructure. This thesis also presents a survey of computer-assisted assessment tools and assessable features for teachers to use in their programming assignments. Finally, the concept of rubric-based assessment tools is introduced to facilitate the manual assessment part of programming assignments

MILO: Models of innovation in learning online at Key Stage 3 and 14-19: Final report appendices

This document contains the appendices to the main report, which presents case studies, which reflect a wide range of models of online learning, each of which has been developed for specific reasons, largely in relation to visions of how technology can transform learning, but also to solve practical problems such as re-engaging disaffected learners and coping with rising pupil numbers

Education or Reputation? A Look At America's Top-Ranked Liberal Arts Colleges

This report examines the country's most prestigious liberal arts colleges. Despite endowments soaring as high as $1.8 billion, nearly all institutions increased tuition during the Great Recession to finance bloated administrative spending, with many college presidents enjoying salaries higher than Barack Obama's. This report peels back reputation to find out what students are really getting for their diploma's$240,000 price ta