19,711 research outputs found
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
On Cognitive Preferences and the Plausibility of Rule-based Models
It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical
models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that
among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more
complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by
focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility
of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the
likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In
particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations
may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for
shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful
discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of
the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against
this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a
crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal
a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference
for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known
cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic,
or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and
plausibility.Comment: V4: Another rewrite of section on interpretability to clarify focus
on plausibility and relation to interpretability, comprehensibility, and
justifiabilit
A Data Science Course for Undergraduates: Thinking with Data
Data science is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines elements of
mathematics, statistics, computer science, and knowledge in a particular
application domain for the purpose of extracting meaningful information from
the increasingly sophisticated array of data available in many settings. These
data tend to be non-traditional, in the sense that they are often live, large,
complex, and/or messy. A first course in statistics at the undergraduate level
typically introduces students with a variety of techniques to analyze small,
neat, and clean data sets. However, whether they pursue more formal training in
statistics or not, many of these students will end up working with data that is
considerably more complex, and will need facility with statistical computing
techniques. More importantly, these students require a framework for thinking
structurally about data. We describe an undergraduate course in a liberal arts
environment that provides students with the tools necessary to apply data
science. The course emphasizes modern, practical, and useful skills that cover
the full data analysis spectrum, from asking an interesting question to
acquiring, managing, manipulating, processing, querying, analyzing, and
visualizing data, as well communicating findings in written, graphical, and
oral forms.Comment: 21 pages total including supplementary material
A Novel ILP Framework for Summarizing Content with High Lexical Variety
Summarizing content contributed by individuals can be challenging, because
people make different lexical choices even when describing the same events.
However, there remains a significant need to summarize such content. Examples
include the student responses to post-class reflective questions, product
reviews, and news articles published by different news agencies related to the
same events. High lexical diversity of these documents hinders the system's
ability to effectively identify salient content and reduce summary redundancy.
In this paper, we overcome this issue by introducing an integer linear
programming-based summarization framework. It incorporates a low-rank
approximation to the sentence-word co-occurrence matrix to intrinsically group
semantically-similar lexical items. We conduct extensive experiments on
datasets of student responses, product reviews, and news documents. Our
approach compares favorably to a number of extractive baselines as well as a
neural abstractive summarization system. The paper finally sheds light on when
and why the proposed framework is effective at summarizing content with high
lexical variety.Comment: Accepted for publication in the journal of Natural Language
Engineering, 201
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