Preservice Elementary Science Teachers' Argumentation Competence: Impact of a Training Programme

The recent literature has shown the importance of Preservice Elementary Science Teachers (PESTs) having a deep understanding of argumentation, as this factor may affect the nature of the class activities that are taught and what students learn. A lack of understanding of this factor may represent an obstacle in the development of science education programmes in line with the development of scientific competences. This paper presents the results of the design and implementation of a training programme of 6 sessions (12 hours of class participation plus 8 hours of personal homework) on argumentation. The programme was carried out by 57 Spanish PESTs from Malaga, Spain. The training programme incorporates the innovative use of certain strategies to improve competence in argumentation, such as teaching PESTs to identify the elements of arguments in order to design assessment rubrics or by including peer assessment during evaluation with and without rubrics. The results obtained on implementing the training programme were evaluated based on the development of PESTs’ argumentation competence using Toulmin’s argumentative model. Data collection methods involved two tasks carried out at the beginning and the end of the programme, i.e., pre-test and post-test, respectively. The conclusion of the study is that students made significant progress in their argumentation competence on completing the course. In addition, PESTs who followed the training programme achieved statistically better results at the end than those in the control group (n = 41), who followed a traditional teaching programme. A 6-month transfer task showed a slight improvement for the PESTs of the experimental group in relation to the control group in their ability to transfer argumentation to practice, especially to the extent to which they mentioned argumentation in their practice portfolios.This work is part of the “I+D Excelencia” project “Development and evaluation of scientific competences through context based and modelling teaching approaches” case studies (EDU2013-41952-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Finance through its 2013 research call

Multi-Track Programming Competitions with Scratch (2016)

High school programming competitions often follow the traditional model of collegiate competitions, exemplified by the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). This tradition has been reinforced by the nature of Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS A), for which ICPC-style problems are considered an excellent practice regimen. As more and more students in high school computer science courses approach the field from broader starting points, such as Exploring Computer Science (ECS), or the new AP CS Principles course, an analogous structure for high school outreach events becomes of greater importance. This paper describes our work on developing a Scratch-based alternative competition for high school students, that can be run in parallel with a traditional morning of ICPC-style problems

On the Students’ Misconceptions in Object-Oriented Language Constructs

Analyze the Object-oriented (OO) source code developed by students provides useful formative tips to instructors. According to this, it is essential to understand the student’s real difficulties allowing instructors to shape effective courses. To provide run-time feedback to students and to study and analyze the evolution of their performances offline and over time we designed a framework and developed a tool. It allows to identify students’ misconceptions analysing source code and to create personalized student reports automatically. In this paper, we present an empirical study, conducted using our toolchain, that involves 1627 projects extracted from the multi-institution Blackbox dataset. We identified a violation model for Java language constructs based on established results in the computing education community. Afterwards, we grouped such violations in categories and analyzed the relations among them. Our contributions might be helpful in delivering formative feedback and supporting instructors who teach Java and object-oriented programming in general