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: Academic help-seeking benefits students' achievement, but existing literature either studies important factors in students' selection of all help resources via self-reported surveys or studies their help-seeking behavior in one or two separate help resources via actual help-seeking records. Little is known about whether computing…

The benefits of service learning in computer and information science (CIS) are believed to be significant, ranging from providing students with real-world experiences to retaining students to positively impacting community partners. Although there are many benefits of service learning, the CIS domain does impose unique costs for integrating…

Norms and values in computing education are constantly changing as dominant narratives about the role of computing in society evolve over time. Within the current evolving landscape of computing education, researchers and practitioners have advocated for ensuring people from all backgrounds, and particularly women, non-binary, and Black,…

With the number of jobs in computer occupations on the rise, there is a greater need for computer science (CS) graduates than ever. At the same time, most CS departments across the country are only seeing 25-30% of women students in their classes, meaning that we are failing to draw interest from a large portion of the population. In this work, we…

In this article, we leverage ideas from the theory of coevolutionary computation to analyze interactions of students with problems. We introduce the idea of "informatively" easy or hard concepts. Our approach is different from more traditional analyses of problem difficulty such as item analysis in the sense that we consider Pareto…

As the field of computing education grows and matures, it has become essential to unite computing education and higher education research. Educational research has highlighted that how students study is crucial to their learning progress, and study behaviors have been found to play an important role in students' academic success. This article…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Courses in computer science curricula often involve group programming assignments. Instructors are required to take several decisions on assignment setup and monitoring, team formation policies, and grading systems. Group programming projects provide unique monitoring opportunities due to the availability of both product and process data, as well…

Despite increasing demands for skilled workers within the technological domain, there is still a deficit in the number of graduates in computing fields (computer science, information technology, and computer engineering). Understanding the factors that contribute to students' motivation and persistence is critical to helping educators,…

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…

The necessity for a steady STEM workforce has prompted academia to develop strategies to encourage people of diverse backgrounds to enter the STEM fields. A bridge program, also known as a conversion program, offers alternative pathways for individuals who have no prior computing education to receive the education that can help in developing their…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

We present a psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the "Cybersecurity Concept Inventory" ("CCI"), completed by 354 students from 29 colleges and universities. The CCI is a conceptual test of understanding created to enable research on instruction quality in cybersecurity education. This work extends previous expert…