A rich body of empirically grounded results and a solid theory base have often been viewed as signs of a mature discipline. Many disciplines have frequently debated what they should accept as legitimate kinds of theories, the proper roles of theory, and appropriate reference disciplines. Computing education research (CER) in particular has seen a…

The use of established and discipline-specific theories within research and practice is an indication of the maturity of a discipline. With computing education research as a relatively young discipline, there has been recent interest in investigating theories that may prove foundational to work in this area, with discipline-specific theories and…

Computing is rapidly becoming a critical literacy for succeeding in an increasingly technological world. While the proliferation of programs dedicated to broadening participation in computing increases access, computing education research can benefit from more directly drawing on current interest development theory to improve interventions that…

Use of theory within a field of research provides the foundation for designing effective research programs and establishing a deeper understanding of the results obtained. This, together with the emergence of domain-specific theory, is often taken as an indicator of the maturity of any research area. This article explores the development and…

It is common to think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge by an individual learner. Starting a century ago, Lev Vygotsky developed a different perspective on learning, initiating a tradition of educational research whose momentum and influence continue to grow. One of Vygotsky's key principles is the "general genetic law of cultural…

Background and Context: With the growing movement to adopt critical framings of computing, scholars have worked to reframe computing education from the narrow development of programming skills to skills in identifying and resisting oppressive structures in computing. However, we have little guidance on how these framings may manifest in classroom…

The 1980s and 1990s saw a robust connection between computer science education and cognitive psychology as researchers worked to understand how students learn to program. More recently, academic disciplines such as science and engineering have begun drawing on cognitive psychology research and theories of learning to create instructional materials…

One of the most commonly cited theories in computing education research is cognitive load theory (CLT), which explains how learning is affected by the bottleneck of human working memory and how teaching may work around that limitation. The theory has evolved over a number of decades, addressing shortcomings in earlier versions; other issues remain…

Context: Computing Education Research (CER) is critical to help the computing education community and policy makers support the increasing population of students who need to learn computing skills for future careers. For a community to systematically advance knowledge about a topic, the members must be able to understand published work thoroughly…

A Concept Inventory (CI) is an assessment to measure student conceptual understanding of a particular topic. This article presents the results of a CI for basic data structures (BDSI) that has been previously shown to have strong evidence for validity. The goal of this work is to help researchers or instructors who administer the BDSI in their own…

Problem: K-12 teachers face many challenges when teaching a new subject like computer science (CS). They are often far removed from the research being conducted to identify evidence-driven solutions to these challenges. Likewise, researchers are also often removed from the challenges of classroom practices that teachers face when teaching CS.…

This paper explores a major theoretical framework from psychology, Dual Process Theory (DPT), which has received surprisingly little attention in the computing education literature. DPT postulates the existence of two qualitatively different kinds of cognitive systems, a fast, intuitive "System 1" and a slow, reflective "System…

The aim of this conceptual article is to provide a framework and a lens for educators in diversifying and making CS education more inclusive. In this article, we conceptualize the notion of computer science capital (CSC), which extends Bourdieu's sociological theory of capital and Archer et al.'s work on "science capital." The CSC…

Modeling is an integral part of many computing-related disciplines and thus also represents a curricular core component in computing education in tertiary education. Competence models in which modeling is integrated at least to some extent already exist in some of these disciplines. However, for the core component of graphical modeling, a…

Computational Thinking (CT), entailing both domain-general and domain-specific skills, is a competency fundamental to computing education and beyond. However, as a cross-domain competency, appropriate assessment design and method remain equivocal. Indeed, the majority of the existing assessments have a predominant focus on measuring programming…