Research on mental model representations developed by programmers during parallel program comprehension is important for informing and advancing teaching methods including model-based learning and visualizations. The goals of the research presented here were to determine: how the mental models of programmers change and develop as they learn…

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…

Previous studies on writing and understanding programs presented evidence that programmers beyond a novice stage utilize plans or plan-like structures. Other studies on code composition showed that learners have difficulties with writing, reading, and debugging code where interacting plans are merged into a short piece of code. In this article, we…

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…

College-educated women in the workforce are discovering a latent interest in and aptitude for computing motivated by the prevalence of computing as an integral part of jobs in many fields as well as continued headlines about the number of unfilled, highly paid computing jobs. One of these women's choices for retraining are the so-called coding…

Collaboration is an important aspect of computing. In a classroom setting, working with others can increase a student's motivation to attempt more challenges, reduce the difficulty of complicated concepts, and bring about greater overall success. Despite extensive research in other domains, there has been minimal exploration within computing on…

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…

This study analyzes the impact of adding a review exercises module to an online tool used in a software engineering degree program. The objective of the module is to promote students' self-learning effort to improve their performance. We also intend to determine if this new feature has any effect on the amount of code copies detected in lab…

Undergraduate computer science students need to learn analytical reasoning skills to develop high-quality software and to understand why the software they develop works as specified. To accomplish this central educational objective, this article describes a systematic process of introducing reasoning skills into the curriculum and assessing how…

Perspectives of students on what constitutes source-code plagiarism may differ based on their educational background. Surveys have been conducted with home students undertaking computing and joint computing subject degrees at higher education institutions throughout the UK, China, and South Cyprus, and a total of 984 responses have been…

Despite the critical societal importance of computer security, security is not well integrated into the undergraduate computing curriculum. Security classes and tracks treat security issues as separable topics as opposed to fundamental issues that pervade all aspects of software development. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on security…

Many people are first exposed to code through web development, yet little is known about the barriers beginners face in these formative experiences. In this article, we describe a study of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory web development course taken by both computing majors and general education students. Using data collected…

Critical thinking, problem solving, the use of tools, and the ability to consume and analyze information are important skills for the 21st century workforce. This article presents a qualitative case study that follows five undergraduate biology majors in a computer science course (CS0). This CS0 course teaches programming within a data-driven…

Although teamwork has been identified as an essential skill for Computer Science (CS) graduates, these skills are identified as lacking by industry employers, which suggests a need for more proactive measures to teach and assess teamwork. In one CS course, students worked in teams to create a wiki solution to problem-based questions. Through a…

Identifying the set of cognitive processes (CPs) a student can go through during computer programming is an interesting research problem. It can provide a better understanding of the human aspects in computer programming process and can also contribute to the computer programming education in general. The study identified the presence of a set of…