ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)最新文献

{"title":"Are They Learning or Playing? Moderator Conditions of Gamification’s Success in Programming Classrooms","authors":"Luiz Rodrigues, F. Pereira, A. Toda, P. Palomino, Wilk Oliveira, Marcela Pessoa, Leandro S. G. Carvalho, David B. F. Oliveira, Elaine H. T. Oliveira, A. Cristea, Seiji Isotani","doi":"10.1145/3485732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3485732","url":null,"abstract":"Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence gamification’s success, especially for CS1 education, is lacking. Thus, there is a clear need to shed light on pre-determinants of gamification’s impact. To tackle this gap, we investigate how user and contextual factors influence gamification’s effect on CS1 students through a quasi-experimental retrospective study ( ( N = 399 ) ), based on a between-subject design (conditions: gamified or non-gamified) in terms of final grade (academic achievement) and the number of programming assignments completed in an educational system (i.e., how much they practiced). Then, we evaluate whether and how user and contextual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, major, programming experience, working situation, internet access, and computer access/sharing) moderate that effect. Our findings indicate that gamification amplified to some extent the impact of practicing. Overall, students practicing in the gamified version presented higher academic achievement than those practicing the same amount in the non-gamified version. Intriguingly, those in the gamified version that practiced much more extensively than the average showed lower academic achievements than those who practiced comparable amounts in the non-gamified version. Furthermore, our results reveal gender as the only statistically significant moderator of gamification’s effect: in our data, it was positive for females but non-significant for males. These findings suggest which (and how) personal and contextual factors moderate gamification’s effects, indicate the need to further understand and examine context’s role, and show that gamification must be cautiously designed to prevent students from playing instead of learning.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"363 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122837690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Educating Students about Programming Plagiarism and Collusion via Formative Feedback","authors":"Oscar Karnalim, Simon, W. Chivers, Billy Susanto Panca","doi":"10.1145/3506717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3506717","url":null,"abstract":"To help address programming plagiarism and collusion, students should be informed about acceptable practices and about program similarity, both coincidental and non-coincidental. However, current approaches are usually manual, brief, and delivered well before students are in a situation where they might commit academic misconduct. This article presents an assessment submission system with automated, personalized, and timely formative feedback that can be used in institutions that apply some leniency in early instances of plagiarism and collusion. If a student’s submission shares coincidental or non-coincidental similarity with other submissions, then personalized similarity reports are generated for the involved submissions and the students are expected to explain the similarity and resubmit the work. Otherwise, a report simulating similarities is sent just to the author of the submitted program to enhance their knowledge. Results from two quasi-experiments involving two academic semesters suggest that students with our approach are more aware of programming plagiarism and collusion, including the futility of some program disguises. Further, their submitted programs have lower similarity even at the level of program flow, suggesting that they are less likely to have engaged in programming plagiarism and collusion. Student behavior while using the system is also analyzed based on the statistics of the generated reports and student justifications for the reported similarities.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121738196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Automated Assessment in Computer Science Education: A State-of-the-Art Review","authors":"J. C. Paiva, J. P. Leal, Á. Figueira","doi":"10.1145/3513140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3513140","url":null,"abstract":"Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science (CS) education and go-to-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not reasonable to consider that teachers could evaluate all attempts that the average learner should develop multiplied by the number of students enrolled in a course, much less in a timely, deep, and fair fashion. Unsurprisingly, exploring the formal structure of programs to automate the assessment of certain features has long been a hot topic among CS education practitioners. Assessing a program is considerably more complex than asserting its functional correctness, as the proliferation of tools and techniques in the literature over the past decades indicates. Program efficiency, behavior, and readability, among many other features, assessed either statically or dynamically, are now also relevant for automatic evaluation. The outcome of an evaluation evolved from the primordial Boolean values to information about errors and tips on how to advance, possibly taking into account similar solutions. This work surveys the state of the art in the automated assessment of CS assignments, focusing on the supported types of exercises, security measures adopted, testing techniques used, type of feedback produced, and the information they offer the teacher to understand and optimize learning. A new era of automated assessment, capitalizing on static analysis techniques and containerization, has been identified. Furthermore, this review presents several other findings from the conducted review, discusses the current challenges of the field, and proposes some future research directions.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"88 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113975256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Metacognition and Self-Regulation in Programming Education: Theories and Exemplars of Use","authors":"Dastyni Loksa, Lauren E. Margulieux, Brett A. Becker, Michelle Craig, Paul Denny, Raymond Pettit, J. Prather","doi":"10.1145/3487050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3487050","url":null,"abstract":"Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of computing education. This article presents a thorough systematic review of metacognition and self-regulation work in the context of computer programming and an in-depth discussion of the theories that have been leveraged in some way. We also discuss several prominent metacognitive and self-regulation theories from the literature outside of computing education—for example, from psychology and education—that have yet to be applied in the context of programming education. In our investigation, we built a comprehensive corpus of papers on metacognition and self-regulation in programming education, and then employed backward snowballing to provide a deeper examination of foundational theories from outside computing education, some of which have been explored in programming education, and others that have yet to be but hold much promise. In addition, we make new observations about the way these theories are used by the computing education community, and present recommendations on how metacognition and self-regulation can help inform programming education in the future. In particular, we discuss exemplars of studies that have used existing theories to support their design and discussion of results as well as studies that have proposed their own metacognitive theories in the context of programming education. Readers will also find the article a useful resource for helping students in programming courses develop effective strategies for metacognition and self-regulation.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130898004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shifting Beliefs in Computer Science: Change in CS Student Mindsets","authors":"Abraham E. Flanigan, Markeya S. Peteranetz, D. Shell, Leen-Kiat Soh","doi":"10.1145/3471574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3471574","url":null,"abstract":"Two studies investigated change in computer science (CS) students’ implicit intelligence beliefs. Across both studies, we found that the strength of incremental and entity beliefs changed across time. In Study 1, we found that incremental beliefs decreased and entity beliefs increased across the semester. Change in implicit intelligence beliefs was similar for students taking introductory and upper-division courses. In Study 2, growth curve analysis revealed a small linear change in incremental beliefs across time but no change in entity beliefs—these trends were similar for students enrolled in introductory and upper-division CS courses. Across both studies, change in implicit intelligence beliefs was not associated with academic achievement in CS. Findings provide preliminary evidence that shifts in implicit intelligence beliefs occur as students progress through the CS curriculum. Finally, findings support that mindset interventions may be more effective if delivered at the beginning of the semester before shifts in beliefs occur.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"109 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121122331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coding with Minecraft: The Development of Middle School Students’ Computational Thinking","authors":"Emine Kutay, Diler Oner","doi":"10.1145/3471573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3471573","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this study is to examine the role of Minecraft-based coding activities on computational thinking (CT) of middle school students. In the study, CT was conceptualized so that it encapsulates not only the knowledge of computational concepts (e.g., loops and conditionals) but also the use of CT practices (e.g., testing and debugging). Data were collected using a combination of knowledge of computational concepts tests, the Minecraft-based coding artifacts, and one-on-one student interviews focusing on the processes of developing computational artifacts. The participants were 20 fifth-grade middle school students from a low-income public school with very limited (if none) formal computer programming experiences before the study. The Minecraft-based coding activities were designed and implemented as an instructional program to last 6 weeks. The results of the study showed a statistically significant increase in students’ knowledge of computational concepts. Based on the analysis of the students’ final coding artifacts, we identified that students mostly used the concepts of sequences, events, loops, and parallelism correctly, whereas variables, operators, and conditionals appeared to be the least successfully used concepts. The qualitative analysis of the artifact-based interviews showed that students employed the CT practices of testing and debugging most of the time while developing an artifact through coding. In contrast, the least resorted CT practice appeared to be reusing and remixing.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"232 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121442342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Elementary Computational Thinking Instruction and Assessment: A Learning Trajectory Perspective","authors":"Feiya Luo, Maya Israel, Brian D. Gane","doi":"10.1145/3494579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3494579","url":null,"abstract":"There is little empirical research related to how elementary students develop computational thinking (CT) and how they apply CT in problem-solving. To address this gap in knowledge, this study made use of learning trajectories (LTs; hypothesized learning goals, progressions, and activities) in CT concept areas such as sequence, repetition, conditionals, and decomposition to better understand students’ CT. This study implemented eight math-CT integrated lessons aligned to U.S. national mathematics education standards and the LTs with third- and fourth-grade students. This basic interpretive qualitative study aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of elementary students’ CT by having students express and articulate their CT in cognitive interviews. Participants’ (n = 22) CT articulation was examined using a priori codes translated verbatim from the learning goals in the LTs and was mapped to the learning goals in the LTs. Results revealed a range of students’ CT in problem-solving, such as using precise and complete problem-solving instructions, recognizing repeating patterns, and decomposing arithmetic problems. By collecting empirical data on how students expressed and articulated their CT, this study makes theoretical contributions by generating initial empirical evidence to support the hypothesized learning goals and progressions in the LTs. This article also discusses the implications for integrated CT instruction and assessments at the elementary level.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116582272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the Special Section on Justice-Centered Computing Education, Part 1","authors":"Michael Lachney, Jean J. Ryoo, Rafi Santo","doi":"10.1145/3477981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3477981","url":null,"abstract":"The ideas we offer below for considering justice-centered computing education point to a broad array of problem-spaces, contexts, and communities that scholars, educators, technologists, and activists might engage with. In exploring and deepening the conversation around this project, the seven articles included in the first volume of this special issue employ diverse theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and frameworks, including but not limited to intersectionality, transformational justice, intercultural computing, ethnocomputing, translanguaging, socially responsible computing, and institutional theory. Across them, rather than consensus on a narrow set of issues, we see the possibilities of a pluralistic and wide-ranging conversation about how we might constitute the meanings of “justice-centered” within computing education, the tools that might be used to produce such meanings, and the actions that might address them.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130408839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rules of Program Behavior","authors":"Rodrigo Duran, Juha Sorva, O. Seppälä","doi":"10.1145/3469128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3469128","url":null,"abstract":"We propose a framework for identifying, organizing, and communicating learning objectives that involve program semantics. In this framework, detailed learning objectives are written down as rules of program behavior (RPBs). RPBs are teacher-facing statements that describe what needs to be learned about the behavior of a specific sort of programs. Different programming languages, student cohorts, and contexts call for different RPBs. Instructional designers may define progressions of RPB rulesets for different stages of a programming course or curriculum; we identify evaluation criteria for RPBs and discuss tradeoffs in RPB design. As a proof-of-concept example, we present a progression of rulesets designed for teaching beginners how expressions, variables, and functions work in Python. We submit that the RPB framework is valuable to practitioners and researchers as a tool for design and communication. Within computing education research, the framework can inform, among other things, the ongoing exploration of “notional machines” and the design of assessments and visualizations. The theoretical work that we report here lays a foundation for future empirical research that compares the effectiveness of RPB rulesets as well as different methods for teaching a particular ruleset.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123028168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Designing for Student-Directedness: How K–12 Teachers Utilize Peers to Support Projects","authors":"Karen Brennan, Sarah Blum-Smith, Laura Peters, Jane M. Kang","doi":"10.1145/3476515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3476515","url":null,"abstract":"Student-directed projects—projects in which students have individual control over what they create and how to create it—are a promising practice for supporting the development of conceptual understanding and personal interest in K–12 computer science classrooms. In this article, we explore a central (and perhaps counterintuitive) design principle identified by a group of K–12 computer science teachers who support student-directed projects in their classrooms: in order for students to develop their own ideas and determine how to pursue them, students must have opportunities to engage with other students’ work. In this qualitative study, we investigated the instructional practices of 25 K–12 teachers using a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews to develop understandings of how they used peer work to support student-directed projects in their classrooms. Teachers described supporting their students in navigating three stages of project development: generating ideas, pursuing ideas, and presenting ideas. For each of these three stages, teachers considered multiple factors to encourage engagement with peer work in their classrooms, including the quality and completeness of shared work and the modes of interaction with the work. We discuss how this pedagogical approach offers students new relationships to their own learning, to their peers, and to their teachers and communicates important messages to students about their own competence and agency, potentially contributing to aims within computer science for broadening participation.","PeriodicalId":352564,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123041923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}