Background: In computing education, educators are constantly faced with the challenge of developing new curricula, including learning objectives (LOs), while ensuring that existing courses remain relevant. Large language models (LLMs) were shown to successfully generate a wide spectrum of natural language artefacts in computing education.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether taking a course online or face-to-face matters in terms of student engagement and achievement. Gender differences were also examined. The level of student engagement in an information technology course in a freshman sample from a school of education was surveyed and compared in two consecutive…

Students' performances in introductory programming courses show large variation across students. There may be many reasons for these variations, such as methods of teaching, teacher competence in the subject, students' coding backgrounds and abilities, students' self-discipline, the teaching environment, and the resources available to students,…

This paper presents a blended learning approach and a study evaluating instruction in a software engineering-related course unit as part of an undergraduate engineering degree program in computing. In the past, the course unit had a lecture-based format. In view of student underachievement and the high course unit dropout rate, a distance-learning…

Previous studies indicate that the use of pair programming has beneficial effects on student learning. In this article, we present a controlled study that directly measured students' acquisition of individual programming skills using laboratory practice (in which students programmed individually under exam conditions). Additionally, we analyzed…

This paper reports on a study involving the administration of two examinations that were designed to evaluate student knowledge in several areas of computing. The tests were given both to computer science majors and to those enrolled in computer science classes from other majors. They sought to discover whether computer science majors demonstrated…

Roles of variables is a new concept that captures tacit expert knowledge in a form that can be taught in introductory programming courses. A role describes some stereotypic use of variables, and only ten roles are needed to cover 99% of all variables in novice-level programs. This paper presents the results of an experiment where roles were…

The relationship of multiple-choice and free-response items on the College Board's Advanced Placement Computer Science Examination was studied using confirmatory factor analysis. Results with 2 samples of 1,000 high school students suggested that the most parsimonious fit was achieved using a single factor. Implications for construct validity are…