Improving Introductory Computer Science Education with DRaCO

Today, many introductory computer science courses rely heavily on a specific programming language to convey fundamental programming concepts. For beginning students, the cognitive capacity required to operate with the syntactic forms of this language may overwhelm their ability to formulate a solution to a program. We recognize that the introductory computer science courses can be more effective if they convey fundamental concepts without requiring the students to focus on the syntax of a programming language. To achieve this, we propose a new teaching method based on the Design Recipe and Code Outlining (DRaCO) processes. Our new pedagogy capitalizes on the algorithmic intuitions of novice students and provides a tool for students to externalize their intuitions using techniques they are already familiar with, rather than with the syntax of a specific programming language. We validate the effectiveness of our new pedagogy by integrating it into an existing CS1 course at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. We find that the our newly proposed pedagogy shows strong potential to improve students’ ability to program

Development of an air quality monitoring network for Kosovo : [presentation given December 13, 2010]

This Capstone Project addresses the important problem of air pollution in Kosovo and the need for improvement of the air quality monitoring system, in compliance with Directive 2008/50/ EC on Ambient Air Quality and Cleaner Air for Europe. This project has identified eight new possible locations taking in consideration all relevant information about the source of pollution, types of areas, number of inhabitants and other relevant factor. The outcome of this project is a functional and reliable Air Quality Network Monitoring System for Kosovo in order to facilitate the air quality assessment and improve air quality in Kosovo

An Implementation of the IT Fundamentals Knowledge Area in an Introductory IT Course

The recently promulgated IT model curriculum contains IT fundamentals (ITF) as one of its knowledge areas. It is intended to give students a broad understanding of (1) the IT profession and the skills that students must develop to become successful IT professionals and (2) the academic discipline of IT and its relationship to other disciplines. The model curriculum recommends 33 lecture hours to complete the IT fundamentals knowledge. The model curriculum also recommends that the material relevant to the IT fundamentals knowledge area be offered early in the curriculum, for example in an Introduction to IT course; however, many institutions will have to include additional material in an introductory IT course. For example, the Introduction to IT course at Georgia Southern University is used to introduce students to the available second disciplines (an important part of the Georgia Southern IT curriculum aimed at providing students with in-depth knowledge of an IT application domain), some productivity tools, and SQL in addition to an introduction to the discipline of IT. For many programs there may be too much material in an introductory IT course. This paper describes how Georgia Southern University resolved this problem by describing the structure of the introductory course at Georgia Southern, its assessment methods, and the relationship between the course and the ITF knowledge area and how those aspects of the ITF knowledge area that are not covered in the introductory course are covered elsewhere in the program

The End Game of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management and the Next Catastrophe

By using the Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant’s spill into the Emory River as a case study, this article offers several explanations for why the twentieth century dynamic of crisis and reform has disappeared in the early twenty-first century. In Part I, it is argued that regulated industries dominate regulatory debates on Capitol Hill and at the federal agencies to an unprecedented extent. Part II examines what is known about the Kingston spill and the implications of that information for recurrence of such events. Part III explains how the EPA and Congress responded to this disaster, highlighting how politics driven by a deregulatory ideology eventually took over the EPA’s science-based rulemaking process. Part IV offers suggestions for rebuilding regulatory agencies like the EPA and for restoring public trust in government.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

A FOCUS ON CONTENT: THE USE OF RUBRICS IN PEER REVIEW TO GUIDE STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS

Students who are solving open-ended problems would benefit from formative assessment, i.e., from receiving helpful feedback and from having an instructor who is informed about their level of performance. Open-ended problems challenge existing assessment techniques. For example, such problems may have reasonable alternative solutions, or conflicting objectives. Analyses of open-ended problems are often presented as free-form text since they require arguments and justifications for one solution over others, and students may differ in how they frame the problems according to their knowledge, beliefs and attitudes.This dissertation investigates how peer review may be used for formative assessment. Computer-Supported Peer Review in Education, a technology whose use is growing, has been shown to provide accurate summative assessment of student work, and peer feedback can indeed be helpful to students. A peer review process depends on the rubric that students use to assess and give feedback to each other. However, it is unclear how a rubric should be structured to produce feedback that is helpful to the student and at the same time to yield information that could be summarized for the instructor.The dissertation reports a study in which students wrote individual analyses of an open-ended legal problem, and then exchanged feedback using Comrade, a web application for peer review. The study compared two conditions: some students used a rubric that was relevant to legal argument in general (the domain-relevant rubric), while others used a rubric that addressed the conceptual issues embedded in the open-ended problem (the problem-specific rubric).While both rubric types yield peer ratings of student work that approximate the instructor's scores, feedback elicited by the domain-relevant rubric was redundant across its dimensions. On the contrary, peer ratings elicited by the problem-specific rubric distinguished among its dimensions. Hierarchical Bayesian models showed that ratings from both rubrics can be fit by pooling information across students, but only problem-specific ratings are fit better given information about distinct rubric dimensions

Information Systems and Healthcare XXXIV: Clinical Knowledge Management Systems—Literature Review and Research Issues for Information Systems

Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged as a possible solution to many of the challenges facing U.S. and international healthcare systems. These challenges include concerns regarding the safety and quality of patient care, critical inefficiency, disparate technologies and information standards, rapidly rising costs and clinical information overload. In this paper, we focus on clinical knowledge management systems (CKMS) research. The objectives of the paper are to evaluate the current state of knowledge management systems diffusion in the clinical setting, assess the present status and focus of CKMS research efforts, and identify research gaps and opportunities for future work across the medical informatics and information systems disciplines. The study analyzes the literature along two dimensions: (1) the knowledge management processes of creation, capture, transfer, and application, and (2) the clinical processes of diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and prognosis. The study reveals that the vast majority of CKMS research has been conducted by the medical and health informatics communities. Information systems (IS) researchers have played a limited role in past CKMS research. Overall, the results indicate that there is considerable potential for IS researchers to contribute their expertise to the improvement of clinical process through technology-based KM approaches