Community and culture significantly influence value orientation, perceived needs, and motivation as well as provide the ground for creating shared understanding. All disciplines have their own cultures, and all cultures evolve through cross-cultural exchanges. The computing community has created and documented a sound body of knowledge of…

Designed to determine whether abstract and concrete concepts are classified similarly, this study used three separate experiments to explore the vertical and horizontal dimensions used by computer scientists to categorize the common concepts of their field. It found that concrete concept categorization operates over a wider range than previously…

A broad range of well-structured problems--embracing forms of diagnosis, catalog selection, and skeletal planning--are solved in expert computer systems by the method of heuristic classification. These programs have a characteristic inference structure that systematically relates data to a pre-enumerated set of solutions by abstraction, heuristic…

Argues that a computer-based programming tutor for novice programmers needs to take into account not only the types and frequency of bugs found in the programs, but the intentions and knowledge state of the programmer. A first version of such a program was developed on the basis of the bug types found in a number of pencil-and-paper studies with…

The sequential probability ratio test (SPRT), developed by Abraham Wald, is one statistical model available for making mastery decisions during computer-based criterion referenced tests. The predictive validity of the SPRT was empirically investigated with two different and relatively large item pools with heterogeneous item parameters. Graduate…