The Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering at University Jaume I has a capstone project in which the student develops, during a 300-hour internship in an enterprise, a real-world project. We collected data for five academic years to analyze the assessment process to propose a new hybrid model, which combines analytic and holistic assessment and…

In recent years, computing education researchers have investigated the impact of problem context on students' learning and programming performance. This work continues the investigation motivated, in part, by cognitive load theory and educational research in computer science and other disciplines. The results of this study could help inform…

Online learning systems should support students preparedness for professional practice by equipping them with the necessary skills while keeping them engaged and active. In that regard, the development of online learning systems that support students' development and engagement with programming is a challenging process. Early career computer…

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…

Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science (CS) education and go-to-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not…

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…

Cheating has been a long-standing issue in university assessments. However, the release of ChatGPT and other free-to-use generative AI tools has provided a new and distinct method for cheating. Students can run many assessment questions through the tool and generate a superficially compelling answer, which may or may not be accurate. We ran a…

Autograding systems are being increasingly deployed to meet the challenges of teaching programming at scale. Studies show that formative feedback can greatly help novices learn programming. This work extends an autograder, enabling it to provide formative feedback on programming assignment submissions. Our methodology starts with the design of a…

A capstone project is an extensive learning experience traditionally developed during a student's final academic year. Assessing such a complex assignment involves several challenges and is usually based upon the evaluations of at least two different people: the capstone project advisor, and one or more other assessors. Quantitative studies…

Assessment plays an important role in education and can both guide and motivate learning. Assessment can, however, be carried out with different aims: providing the students with feedback that supports the learning (formative assessment) and judging to which degree the students have fulfilled the intended learning outcomes (summative assessment).…

Systematic endeavors to take computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) to scale in middle and high school classrooms are underway with curricula that emphasize the enactment of authentic CT skills, especially in the context of programming in block-based programming environments. There is, therefore, a growing need to measure students'…

This research aimed at evaluating the development and use of low-cost affective domain assessment instruments, culminating with personal and group characterization of representative global information technology (IT) professional values. Values and valuing are a compelling component of Bloom's affective domain of learning for engineering…

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…

Students often face difficulties while learning object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts. Many papers have presented various assessment methods for diagnosing learning problems to improve the teaching of programming in computer science (CS) higher education. The research presented in this article illustrates that although max-min composition is…

Learning to program, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, is a difficult undertaking for many students. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting with different introductory…