Reevaluating the relationship between explaining, tracing, and writing skills in CS1 in a replication study

Fowler, Max; Smith, David H.; Hassan, Mohammed; Poulsen, Seth; West, Matthew; Zilles, Craig

doi:10.1080/08993408.2022.2079866

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…They should also be able to abstract the purpose of part of a code. Once successful in both tasks, learners are better able to develop programs [8] [11]. Instructional methodologies based on this precedence of instructional activities have even been proposed and validated [40].…”

Section: ) Difficulties In Learning Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proposals for the Promotion of Computing in K-12 Studies in Spain

Lopez,

Llorens-Largo,

Marqués-Andrés

et al. 2023

2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)

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The information society requires new skills and knowledge about how to cope in a computerized world. Although it is fully assumed in the political and social discourse, it is a neglected subject in formal education. Each nation should analyze how computing is learned in its K-12 education system. This research-to-practice paper presents the report carried out in Spain promoted by two academic associations, which analyzes the state of computing education in Spain in K-12 studies, summarizes some elements of the didactics of computing and analyzes the training received by teachers who will train K-12 students. The report also presents some reflections of the working group in charge, and nine proposals for improvement oriented to policy makers are pointed out.

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Section: ) Difficulties In Learning Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proposals for the Promotion of Computing in K-12 Studies in Spain

Lopez,

Llorens-Largo,

Marqués-Andrés

et al. 2023

2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)

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show abstract

“…Additionally, they found more significant associations between subjective and objective metrics of individual contribution to team projects than in the original study. • Fowler et al [27] performed a study to replicate a slightly simplified hierarchy of reading, tracing and writing code skills from a study by Lopez et al [45]. They expanded on the original study by using a larger sample size and investigating multiple possible structural equation models to see which could best explain the data.…”

Section: 53mentioning

confidence: 99%

Launching Registered Report Replications in Computer Science Education Research

Brown

Marinus

Cheuoua

2022

Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 1

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Background and Context. The quality of a research field is greatly determined by the quality of its publications. However, in many research fields this quality is endangered because of biases towards publishing positive results, which have led to questionable research practices that negatively impact the reliability of the reported findings.Objectives. We explored two approaches that could guard against these questionable research practices for computer science education research: 1. The replication of prior studies to confirm (or refute) previous findings and 2. requiring authors to submit a registered report, containing hypotheses, methods, and analytic procedures, before conducting the studies. Method. Over the span of 18 months, we organized a special issue of the Computer Science Education journal that only accepted registered reports that replicated a previous computer science education research study. Registered reports involve peer review and approval at the research design stage, before data collection begins. The editorial process was thus modified to accommodate multiple rounds of review and a longer time period between original and final submissions. We believe this is the first use of registered reports in computer science education research. A questionnaire gathering feedback on the new process was also administered to the authors of the accepted reports. Findings. We found seven author teams willing to submit a manuscript for the special issue. Out of this pool, preregistered reports from five teams were accepted to be taken forwards. One team then withdrew because the ethics procedure at their institution exceeded the special issue timeline. The remaining four author teams conducted their studies and resubmitted full papers that were accepted, pending some final corrections. Authors' feedback about the registered reports process was positive. Implications. We demonstrated that it is possible to attract interest for registered report replications in a computer science education journal issue, and to successfully conduct the necessary editorial steps. Future efforts should attend to challenges related to modified research and journal submission timelines and consider adding a second review cycle for the first stage of registered reports. While the procedures used in this special issue may be suitable for many

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“…Understanding the skill development of students who are learning to write programs is a key challenge in the field of computer science education [7,23,32,34,37,19,10]. Learning curve analysis offers a methodology to empirically validate domain models that describe such skills [15], however, attempts to apply learning curve analysis in the context of programming education have yielded few results so far.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reexamining Learning Curve Analysis in Programming Education: The Value of Many Small Problems

Demirtaş,

Fowler,

Cunningham

2024

Preprint

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[to appear in EDM 2024] Analyzing which skills students develop in introductory programming education is an important question for the computer science education community. Knowledge components, units of knowledge that can be measured by performance on a set of tasks, can be used to identify key concepts and skills in a given domain. While knowledge components in other domains have been successfully identified using learning curve analysis, such attempts on students' open-ended code-writing assignments have not been very successful. To understand why, we replicated a previously proposed approach, which uses abstract syntax tree (AST) nodes as knowledge components, on data collected across multiple semesters of a large-scale introductory programming course. Findings from our replication show that, given sufficient measurement opportunities, AST nodes can provide a viable knowledge component model for learning curve analysis to understand student learning, contrary to earlier findings. In addition to providing evidence for the validity of AST-based knowledge components, we recommend a set of conditions for programming courses that enable knowledge components generated using AST nodes to be successfully observed using learning curve analysis. This supports the integration of learning curves as a tool in any environment collecting code-writing data to be used for modifying the curriculum based on student performance and monitoring the development of skills related to language elements.

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Reevaluating the relationship between explaining, tracing, and writing skills in CS1 in a replication study

Cited by 13 publications

References 51 publications

Proposals for the Promotion of Computing in K-12 Studies in Spain

Proposals for the Promotion of Computing in K-12 Studies in Spain

Launching Registered Report Replications in Computer Science Education Research

Reexamining Learning Curve Analysis in Programming Education: The Value of Many Small Problems

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