As a key motivational factor that determines future teaching success with Computational Thinking (CT), in this cross-sectional survey study, we investigated if and how preservice teachers' (n = 76) self-efficacy for CT teaching, their usage of CT tools, and their motivation (utility value) were (inter)related. Through a series of regression…

The number of years to estimate value-added measures (VAM) has received insufficient attention. Researchers often use as many years as available, to increase precision and decrease transitory sorting bias. However, this decision has little theoretical or empirical backing. We develop a theoretical framework and evaluate data from thousands of…

Inappropriate treatment of missing data may introduce bias into the value-added estimation. We consider a commonly used value-added model (VAM), which includes the past student test score as a covariate. We formulate a joint model of student achievement and missing data, in which the probability of observing a test score depends on observing the…

Many education policy strategy documents at the European Union level, as well as national strategies of various countries, recommend including computational thinking as a fundamental skill in curricula. The professional development of teachers should be supported to disseminate computational thinking in K12 education. Teachers' value beliefs about…

As a result of COVID-19, various forms of education and teaching are moving online. However, the notion of an online STEM camp is still in its beginnings, and there is little relevant research and experience in this context. At the beginning of April 2021, the research team launched an online STEM charity camp with the theme of "Shen Nong…

Developing computational thinking (CT) skills at an early age can help develop literacy, science, and mathematics skills; however, CT instruction in grades K-2 remains limited. This study examined the perceptions of 45 K-2 teachers from 30 school districts before and after a CT professional development (PD) experience. The PD included two online…

By aggregating residual gain scores (the differences between each student's current score and a predicted score based on prior performance) for a school or a teacher, value-added models (VAMs) can be used to generate estimates of school or teacher effects. It is known that random errors in the prior scores will introduce bias into predictions of…

Contribution: Knowledge of students' Habits of Mind in a signal processing course, and a method for education research. The method identifies factors that may influence students' performance, but are not evident when analyzing agglomerated data; it is an alternative to the traditional case study method as it derives the cases after applying a…

In this article, several ways to adjust gross school effects are discussed to set the stage for estimating treatment effects in schooling. Although it is quite hazardous to hypothesize realistic benchmarks for results from meta-analyses, because of the dependency of effect sizes on subject matter area, grade level, and study characteristics, a…

The traditional approach to estimating the consistency of school effects across subject areas and the stability of school effects across time is to fit separate value-added multilevel models to each subject or cohort and to correlate the resulting empirical Bayes predictions. We show that this gives biased correlations and these biases cannot be…

In this article we develop a methodology for the joint value added analysis of multiple outcomes that takes into account the inherent correlation between them. This is especially crucial in the analysis of higher education institutions. We use a unique Colombian database on universities, which contains scores in five domains tested in a…

School districts across the United States increasingly use value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer with school-year learning and potentially bias estimates of teacher effectiveness. We investigate the practical…

As an international informatics contest, or challenge, Bebras has started the second decade of its existence. The contest attracts more and more countries every year, recently there have been over 40 participating countries. From a single contest-focused annual event Bebras developed to a multifunctional challenge and an activities-based…

Computational aesthetics is a relatively new subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). It includes research that enables computers to "recognize" (and evaluate) beauty in various domains such as visual art, music, and games. Aside from the benefit this gives to humans in terms of creating and appreciating art in these domains, there are perhaps…

Houston's experience with the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (R) (EVAAS) raises questions that other districts should consider before buying the software and using it for high-stakes decisions. Researchers found that teachers in Houston, all of whom were under the EVAAS gun, but who taught relatively more racial minority students,…