Identifying important and difficult concepts in introductory computing courses using a delphi process

Goldman, Ken; Gross, Paul; Heeren, Cinda; Herman, Geoffrey L.; Kaczmarczyk, Lisa C.; Loui, Michael C.; Zilles, Craig

doi:10.1145/1352135.1352226

Cited by 83 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 5 publications

(1 reference statement)

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“…Goldman et al [7] have identified important and difficult concepts in an introductory computing course. As a result they have generated a list of programming fundamental (CS1) topics that the teachers had rated both by how difficult and how important they think the topics are.…”

Section: Drop Out Reasons and Difficulties Related To Learning Programentioning

confidence: 99%

CS minors in a CS1 course

Kinnunen¹,

Malmi²

2008

Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Computing Education Research

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The focus of this paper is on science students (CS minors) in a CS1 Java course at a technical university. The following three questions are discussed: 1) Which programming related topics the students at the target CS1 course find difficult to learn, and what is the difference between the students that passed the course and the students that dropped out of the course. 2) What kind of strategies both the passed and the dropout students used when they faced a difficult programming related topic. 3) Why some students decided to drop out of the course.The research questions are tackled with a quantitative approach. 459 students that passed the CS1 course and 119 dropout students answered the questionnaire. The most difficult topics to learn were finding runtime errors and planning one's own code. Inheritance & abstract classes, and handling files were also regarded as difficult topics. The open-ended question in the questionnaire revealed six viable strategies the students used when they faced difficult topics. The factor analysis elicited five dropout reasons: course arrangements, difficulty to understand course topics, time management and preferences, lack of consequences of dropping out, and effect of other courses.The results are discussed in the light of the general system theory that highlights the multi-dimensionality of the dropout phenomenon.

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Section: Drop Out Reasons and Difficulties Related To Learning Programentioning

confidence: 99%

CS minors in a CS1 course

Kinnunen¹,

Malmi²

2008

Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Computing Education Research

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“…Our preliminary findings for Step 1 above were previously published [Goldman et al 2008], so in this article, we present additional and expanded information on our findings for each of the three computing subjects we are focusing on. Because we seek to develop CIs that are widely applicable, we sought the opinions of a diverse group of experts using a Delphi process (described in Section 3), an approach used to develop some previous CIs [Gray et al 2003;Streveler et al 2003].…”

Section: · 5:mentioning

confidence: 83%

Setting the Scope of Concept Inventories for Introductory Computing Subjects

Goldman

Gross

Heeren

et al. 2010

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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102

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A concept inventory is a standardized assessment tool intended to evaluate a student's understanding of the core concepts of a topic. In order to create a concept inventory it is necessary to accurately identify these core concepts. A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We present the results of three Delphi processes to identify topics that are important and difficult in each of three introductory computing subjects: discrete mathematics, programming fundamentals, and logic design. The topic rankings can not only be used to guide the coverage of concept inventories, but can also be used by instructors to identify what topics merit special attention.

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“…In a study of experts, Goldman et al [7] found that experts ranked "tracing and designing recursive algorithms" to be among the most difficult of thirty-two fundamental programming concepts. Further, experts did not agree on whether "tracing and designing recursive algorithms" was an appropriate topic for a first course.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bug Infestation!

Murphy

Fitzgerald

Grissom

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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A goal-plan analysis was conducted to examine the variety of plans students use in writing a recursive method for an operation on a binary search tree. Students were asked to write a recursive method to count the nodes in a binary search tree with exactly one child. The problem incorporated two goals: traversing the tree and counting nodes with one child. Three traversal plans and four counting plans were observed in student solutions. Over half of the students used the arm's-length recursion plan, which involves testing for the base case before it is actually reached in order to avoid making recursive calls. This strategy creates complex and error prone code. Making students aware of arm's-length recursion may help them avoid introducing bugs into their recursive code. Although nearly all of the 18 participants demonstrated viable plans for solving the problem, their solutions contained a variety of errors: 55 total errors of 15 types. Students had particular difficulty with base cases, misplaced calculations, and missing method calls. Knowledge of these errors can be useful for instructors when developing lecture examples, identifying distractors for peer instruction multiple-choice questions and for designing homework exercises. Instructors can counteract these problems by providing a variety of recursive examples.

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Identifying important and difficult concepts in introductory computing courses using a delphi process

Cited by 83 publications

References 5 publications

CS minors in a CS1 course

CS minors in a CS1 course

Setting the Scope of Concept Inventories for Introductory Computing Subjects

Bug Infestation!

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