A study of performance in chemistry among lower secondary government schools in Zanzibar

Performance in chemistry of form two national examinations among lower secondary government schools in Zanzibar have not been encouraging for couples of subsequent years as from 2009 to date despite several attempts made through additional carefully planned instructional strategies and models to improve the status of teaching and learning chemistry. A total of 31government schools from Unguja regions of Zanzibar Island were sampled. The form two classes of these schools have an average of 48 students with quite a fraction has two streams. This commensurate well with the country’s growing population. The Performance data gotten from the Ministry of Education and Vocational training Zanzibar reveals that the average mean score of this compulsory subject in this grade since then until is 30.16 with a mean standard deviation of 2.1995 while those who passed the chemistry subject are 30 ± 10 %. The percentage pass is set at 35 %. Basing on the average test score data and performance analysis, a large significant number of students fails in the subject and this has been persistent. From this study, enhancement of teachers’ effectiveness, improved economies of education and fewer schools to be set aside for science studies is indeed appreciated. This study recommends the heuristic approach as “modus oparandi” of teaching intertwined with instructional objectives to bring learners into meaningful learning and effective understanding guided by the four domains of Bloom’s taxonomy with more motivational orientation and innovations

Relationships: computational thinking, pedagogy of programming, and Bloom’s Taxonomy

This study explores the relationship between computational thinking, teaching programming, and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Data is collected from teachers, academics, and professionals, purposively selected because of their knowledge of the topics of problem solving, computational thinking, or the teaching of programming. This data is analysed following a grounded theory approach. A computational thinking taxonomy is developed. The relationships between cognitive processes, the pedagogy of programming, and the perceived levels of difficulty of computational thinking skills are illustrated by a model. Specifically, a definition for computational thinking is presented. The skills identified are mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy: Cognitive Domain. This mapping concentrates computational skills at the application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels. Analysis of the data indicates that abstraction of functionality is less difficult than abstraction of data, but both are perceived as difficult. The most difficult computational thinking skill is reported as decomposition. This ordering of difficulty for learners is a reversal of the cognitive complexity predicted by Bloom’s model. The plausibility of this inconsistency is explored. The taxonomy, model, and the other results of this study may be used by educators to focus learning onto the computational thinking skills acquired by the learners, while using programming as a tool. They may also be employed in the design of curriculum subjects, such as ICT, computing, or computer science. <br/

Relationships between reading, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

This study analyzed student responses to an examination, after the students had completed one semester of instruction in programming. The performance of students on code tracing tasks correlated with their performance on code writing tasks. A correlation was also found between performance on "explain in plain English" tasks and code writing. A stepwise regression, with performance on code writing as the dependent variable, was used to construct a path diagram. The diagram suggests the possibility of a hierarchy of programming related tasks. Knowledge of programming constructs forms the bottom of the hierarchy, with "explain in English", Parson's puzzles, and the tracing of iterative code forming one or more intermediate levels in the hierarchy. Copyright 2008 ACM

À procura de um contexto para apoiar a aprendizagem inicial de programação

"As elevadas taxas de insucesso em disciplinas introdutórias de programação são um problema comum por todo o mundo, motivando muitos investigadores a propor metodologias e ferramentas na tentativa de resolver o problema. No entanto, o panorama tem-se mantido praticamente inalterado. Têm sido referidas na literatura muitas causas para esses problemas. O nosso grupo de investigação tem vindo a realizar um conjunto de experiências para identificar e compreender as dificuldades dos alunos em disciplinas introdutórias de programação. Este documento inclui os resultados de um conjunto de estudos que realizamos nos últimos anos com esse intuito. Os resultados serviram de base para definir uma nova abordagem pedagógica que consiste num conjunto de práticas educativas, procurando criar contextos de aprendizagem que motivam os alunos, aumentam o seu envolvimento com as atividades do curso, e maximizam as suas possibilidades de aprendizagem. É também apresentada a aplicação de um método pedagógico num ambiente real e são descritos os resultados obtidos com a sua aplicação ao longo dos últimos anos. Palavras-chave: Educação em Ciências Computacionais, Estudantes de Engenharia, Ensino da Engenharia, Resolução de Problemas, Motivação, Taxonomias de Aprendizagem. Looking for a context to support early learning programming Abstract: High failure rates are a common problem in many programming courses. This has motivated many researchers to propose methodologies and tools to help students. However, the panorama has remained mostly unchanged. Many causes for the learning problems have already been identified in the literature. Our research group has been conducting a set of experiments to identify and understand students programming difficulties. This paper includes the results of a set of studies conducted in the last few years. Their results served as a basis to define a new pedagogical approach consisting in a set of educational practices, looking to create learning contexts that motivate students, increase their involvement with course activities, and maximize their learning possibilities. The application of this pedagogical approach in a real setting is described and the results obtained are discussed. Keywords: Computer Science Education, Enginefering students, Engineering education, Learning Styles, Problem Solving, Motivation, Learning Taxonomies

Consolidação de conhecimentos de programação com o desenvolvimento de aplicações para dispositivos móveis num curso vocacional

Relatório da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino da Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, 2016O presente relatório desenvolveu-se no âmbito do Mestrado em Ensino da Informática e tem como objetivo descrever o projeto de intervenção pedagógica desenvolvido na escola secundária da Portela, no ano letivo 2015/2016 com uma turma do 7º ano do curso vocacional, especificamente na disciplina Programação e Multimédia. A intervenção decorreu no módulo 3, Linguagem de Programação Visual no espaço temporal de 9 aulas de 90 minutos. Esta disciplina integra a componente vocacional do curso que deve assumir uma perspetiva prática e experimental de ensino envolvendo os alunos em trabalho colaborativo e através de projetos para a resolução de problemas reais. O plano da intervenção foi desenhado tendo como objetivo a consolidação dos conhecimentos de programação através do desenvolvimento de aplicações Android para dispositivos móveis para posterior participação no projeto nacional “Apps for Good”. A estratégia de ensino escolhida foi o Project Based Learning (PjBL), Assim desenhou-se um cenário de aprendizagem, onde foram descritos os objetivos gerais e específicos do projeto, as atividades a desenvolver pelos alunos, os recursos e as estratégicas pedagógicas. A partir deste foram desenvolvidos os planos de aula e os respetivos instrumentos para recolha de dados e avaliação do projeto. Os resultados encontrados demonstraram a existência de progressos nas aprendizagens dos alunos, em particular, no que respeita ao conceito de “variável”. A avaliação da metodologia proposta bem como do desempenho da professora em causa foi positivamente avaliado pelos alunos.This report was developed in the context of the Masters in Informatics Teaching at the University of Lisbon and has the aim to describe a pedagogical intervention project developed in the secondary school of the Portela, in 7th grade class of a vocational course, specifically in the ‘Programming and Multimedia’ subject. The intervention took place in module 3 - Visual Programming Language - in a total of 9 lessons of 90 minutes. This subject integrates the vocational component of the vocational course which must assume a practical and experimental teaching perspective involving the pupils in collaborative work and real world problem – solving projects. The intervention plan was drawn having as objective the consolidation of the programming knowledge through the development of Android applications for mobile devices for posterior participation in the national project “Apps for Good”. The chosen teaching strategy was the Project Based Learning. Thus a learning scenario was drawn, as well as its main goals, the activities to be developed by the students, the required resources and the pedagogical strategies. From it the lessons plans were develop as well as the instruments for data collection and project’s evaluation. The results had demonstrated the existence of progress in the students learning, in particular, to what concerns the concept of ‘variable’. The evaluation of the methodology proposal, as well as of the performance of the teacher was also evaluated positively by the students

The effective use of multiple-choice questions in assessing scientific calculations

This study investigated the effective use of online Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) with immediate formative feedback, and the granting of partial credit for correct second or third chance answers when assessing and assisting students’ conceptual learning at higher cognitive levels. The research sample comprised first year engineering science students at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), Pretoria campus. The differences between using online MCQ-assessment for problem-solving calculations and using constructed written questions (CRQs)1 in the assessment of problem-solving calculations were explored. Furthermore, the differences between the assessment of problem-solving calculations using online MCQs without immediate formative feedback, and with immediate formative feedback and the granting of partial credit were analysed. The findings revealed that students’ marks were lower when answering problem-solving calculations using online MCQs without immediate formative feedback than when answering the same questions using CRQs. This clearly indicates that using online MCQs without immediate formative feedback is not effective in assessing scientific problem-solving calculations. Alternatively, online MCQs proved effective in assessing problem-solving calculations when immediate formative feedback and partial credit were employed. The statistical analysis showed that students performed significantly better when immediate formative feedback was given and partial credit was granted for correct second or third attempts. This was due to online MCQs utilising immediate formative feedback, which made it possible to grant partial credit when students chose the correct answers after feedback. This showed that online MCQs with immediate formative feedback and partial credit being granted can be an effective assessment tool for scientific problem-solving calculations. It increases performance and supports learning from assessment. Students can thus correct their calculations whilst in the process of doing them.Science and Technology EducationM. Ed. (Science Education

How can the teaching of programming be used to enhance computational thinking skills?

The use of the term computational thinking, introduced in 2006 by Jeanette Wing, is having repercussions in the field of education. The term brings into sharp focus the concept of thinking about problems in a way that can lead to solutions that may be implemented in a computing device. Implementation of these solutions may involve the use of programming languages.This study explores ways in which programming can be employed as a tool to teach computational thinking and problem solving. Data is collected from teachers, academics, and professionals, purposively selected because of their knowledge of the topics of problem solving, computational thinking, or the teaching of programming. This data is analysed following a grounded theory approach. A Computational Thinking Taxonomy is developed. The relationships between cognitive processes, the pedagogy of programming, and the perceived levels of difficulty of computational thinking skills are illustrated by a model.Specifically, a definition for computational thinking is presented. The skills identified are mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy: Cognitive Domain. This mapping concentrates computational skills at the application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels. Analysis of the data indicates that the less difficult computational thinking skills for beginner programmers are generalisation, evaluation, and algorithm design. Abstraction of functionality is less difficult than abstraction of data, but both are perceived as difficult. The most difficult computational thinking skill is reported as decomposition. This ordering of difficulty for learners is a reversal of the cognitive complexity predicted by Bloom’s model. The plausibility of this inconsistency is explored.The taxonomy, model, and the other results of this study may be used by educators to focus learning onto the computational thinking skills acquired by the learners, while using programming as a tool. They may also be employed in the design of curriculum subjects, such as ICT, computing, or computer science

O processo de discretização do raciocínio matemático na tradução para o raciocínio computacional : um estudo de caso no ensino/aprendizagem de algoritmos

Inclui apendicesOrientador: José Carlos CifuentesTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Educação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação. Defesa: Curitiba, 30/03/2009Inclui bibliografiaLinha de pesquisa: Educação matemáticaResumo :Este trabalho aborda a aprendizagem e o ensino de introdução à programação, cujo conteúdo central é a elaboração de algoritmos computacionais. Observa-se que muitos dos alunos, embora detenham conhecimentos matemáticos oriundos do Ensino Médio, para resolver problemas matemáticos encontram dificuldades na passagem do raciocínio matemático para o correspondente computacional. Para realizar esta passagem, é necessário utilizar os conhecimentos adquiridos previamente com um novo formato, devido ao processo de discretização necessário para transformar o raciocínio matemático no correspondente computacional. Para conceber esta discretização, os conhecimentos matemáticos estabelecidos irão sofrer uma "ruptura epistemológica", pois se trata de uma mudança na forma de compreender um conhecimento. Além disso, para elaborar um algoritmo, utilizamse registros de representação semiótica diferentes daqueles utilizados pela linguagem natural, e pela linguagem matemática, o que vem a ser mais um fator produtor de obstáculo. Para identificar as principais dificuldades dos alunos nesta fase, realizamos uma pesquisa empírica, por meio de um estudo de caso com múltiplos casos, concluindo que elas estão relacionadas às estruturas de repetição, necessárias para realizar o processo de discretização, bem como às diferenças entre os registros de representação semiótica de partida (linguagem natural) e os de chegada (linguagem computacional).Abstract : This work deals with learning and teaching of programming introduction, which central focus is the development of computational algorithms. It is observed that many of the students, although having mathematical skills acquired in high school, have difficulties to solve mathematical problems when transposing the mathematical reasoning to its corresponding computational thinking. For this transition to be made, it is necessary to use the knowledge acquired previously within a new arrangement, due to the process of discretization required to change the mathematical reasoning into its computational correlative. To conceive such discretization, the established mathematical knowledge will undergo an "epistemological rupture", because it is a change in the way of understanding knowledge. Moreover, to develop an algorithm, records of semiotic representation, other than those used by natural language and mathematic language, are employed, becoming an additional hindrance-producing factor. To identify the major difficulties of the students at this stage, we conducted an empirical research through a case study with multiple cases, concluding that they are related to the structures of repetition, necessary to accomplish the process of discretization, as well as to the differences between the records of semiotic representation at the start (natural language) and those at the end (computer language)

Unsupervised relation extraction for e-learning applications

In this modern era many educational institutes and business organisations are adopting the e-Learning approach as it provides an effective method for educating and testing their students and staff. The continuous development in the area of information technology and increasing use of the internet has resulted in a huge global market and rapid growth for e-Learning. Multiple Choice Tests (MCTs) are a popular form of assessment and are quite frequently used by many e-Learning applications as they are well adapted to assessing factual, conceptual and procedural information. In this thesis, we present an alternative to the lengthy and time-consuming activity of developing MCTs by proposing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based approach that relies on semantic relations extracted using Information Extraction to automatically generate MCTs. Information Extraction (IE) is an NLP field used to recognise the most important entities present in a text, and the relations between those concepts, regardless of their surface realisations. In IE, text is processed at a semantic level that allows the partial representation of the meaning of a sentence to be produced. IE has two major subtasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). In this work, we present two unsupervised RE approaches (surface-based and dependency-based). The aim of both approaches is to identify the most important semantic relations in a document without assigning explicit labels to them in order to ensure broad coverage, unrestricted to predefined types of relations. In the surface-based approach, we examined different surface pattern types, each implementing different assumptions about the linguistic expression of semantic relations between named entities while in the dependency-based approach we explored how dependency relations based on dependency trees can be helpful in extracting relations between named entities. Our findings indicate that the presented approaches are capable of achieving high precision rates. Our experiments make use of traditional, manually compiled corpora along with similar corpora automatically collected from the Web. We found that an automatically collected web corpus is still unable to ensure the same level of topic relevance as attained in manually compiled traditional corpora. Comparison between the surface-based and the dependency-based approaches revealed that the dependency-based approach performs better. Our research enabled us to automatically generate questions regarding the important concepts present in a domain by relying on unsupervised relation extraction approaches as extracted semantic relations allow us to identify key information in a sentence. The extracted patterns (semantic relations) are then automatically transformed into questions. In the surface-based approach, questions are automatically generated from sentences matched by the extracted surface-based semantic pattern which relies on a certain set of rules. Conversely, in the dependency-based approach questions are automatically generated by traversing the dependency tree of extracted sentence matched by the dependency-based semantic patterns. The MCQ systems produced from these surface-based and dependency-based semantic patterns were extrinsically evaluated by two domain experts in terms of questions and distractors readability, usefulness of semantic relations, relevance, acceptability of questions and distractors and overall MCQ usability. The evaluation results revealed that the MCQ system based on dependency-based semantic relations performed better than the surface-based one. A major outcome of this work is an integrated system for MCQ generation that has been evaluated by potential end users.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo