Programming Versus Natural Language: On the Effect of Context on Typing in CS1

Peer reviewe

Morning or Evening? An Examination of Circadian Rhythms of CS1 Students

Circadian rhythms are the cycles of our internal clock that play a key role in governing when we sleep and when we are active. A related concept is chronotype, which is a person's natural tendency toward activity at certain times of day and typically governs when the individual is most alert and productive. In this work we investigate chronotypes in the setting of an Introductory Computer Programming (CS1) course. Using keystroke data collected from students we investigate the existence of chronotypes through unsupervised learning. The chronotypes we find align with those of typical populations reported in the literature and our results support correlations of certain chronotypes to academic achievement. We also find a lack of support for the still-popular stereotype of a computer programmer as a night owl. The analyses are conducted on data from two universities, one in the US and one in Europe, that use different teaching methods. In comparison of the two contexts, we look into programming assignment design and administration that may promote better programming practices among students in terms of procrastination and effort.Peer reviewe

Crowdsourcing in Computing Education Research: Case Amazon MTurk

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon MTurk provide access to a human workforce that can be given tasks to complete online for a fee. In this article, we review studies in computing education research (CER) that rely on crowdsourcing; we also describe our own experiences of using Amazon MTurk for a CER study. We discuss challenges in recruiting workers with specific backgrounds—such as no programming experience—and considerations in filtering out unreliable research participants. Combining recommendations from the literature with the lessons that we learned whilst conducting our study, we synthesize advice for researchers in CER who are considering crowdsourcing. In our case study, we did not find widespread foul play by crowdsourced workers and, overall, our experiences and the literature suggest that crowdsourced CER is feasible. It is, however, uncertain to what extent crowdsourced data can produce answers that apply to specific educational contexts. More research is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn about the validity and generalizability of crowdsourced CER.Peer reviewe

Pausing While Programming: Insights From Keystroke Analysis

Pauses in typing are generally considered to indicate cognitive processing and so are of interest in educational contexts. While much prior work has looked at typing behavior of Computer Science students, this paper presents results of a study specifically on the pausing behavior of students in Introductory Computer Programming. We investigate the frequency of pauses of different lengths, what last actions students take before pausing, and whether there is a correlation between pause length and performance in the course. We find evidence that frequency of pauses of all lengths is negatively correlated with performance, and that, while some keystrokes initiate pauses consistently across pause lengths, other keystrokes more commonly initiate short or long pauses. Clustering analysis discovers two groups of students, one that takes relatively fewer mid-to-long pauses and performs better on exams than the other.Peer reviewe

Algorithm Visualization and the Elusive Modality Effect

The modality effect in multimedia learning suggests that pictures are best accompanied by audio explanations rather than text, but this finding has not been replicated in computing education. We investigate which instructional modality works best as an accompaniment for algorithm visualizations. In a randomized controlled trial, learners were split into three conditions who viewed an instructional video on Dijkstra's algorithm, with diagrams accompanied by audio, text, or both. We find neither a modality effect in favor of the audio condition nor a verbal redundancy effect in favor of using only a single modality rather than both. Taken together with earlier research, our findings suggest that the modality effect is difficult to apply reliably and computing educators should not rush to integrate audio into visualizations in expectation of the effect. We discuss theoretical viewpoints that future research should attend to; these include alternative part-explanations of the modality effect and attention-based models of working memory, among others.Peer reviewe