We investigate conditions in which novices make some reference errors when programming. We asked students from introductory programming courses to perform a simple code-writing task that required constructing references to objects and their attributes. By experimentally manipulating the nature of the attributes in the tasks, from identifying…

It is common to think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge by an individual learner. Starting a century ago, Lev Vygotsky developed a different perspective on learning, initiating a tradition of educational research whose momentum and influence continue to grow. One of Vygotsky's key principles is the "general genetic law of cultural…

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…

There are many paradigms available to address the unique and complex problems introduced with parallel programming. These complexities have implications for computer science education as ubiquitous multi-core computers drive the need for programmers to understand parallelism. One major obstacle to student learning of parallel programming is that…

Objectives: The increasing demand for computing skills has led to a rapid rise in the development of new computer science (CS) curricula, many with the goal of equitably broadening the participation of underrepresented students in CS. While such initiatives are vital, factors outside of the school environment also play a role in influencing…

Learning to program requires perseverance, practice, and the mindset that programming skills are improved through these activities (i.e., that everyone has the potential to become good at programming). In contrast to an entity mindset, individuals with an incremental mindset believe that ability is malleable and can be improved with effort. Prior…

Digital literacy is considered to be crucial for social and professional participation. Hence, several projects have been launched in school, as well as extracurricular activities to promote digital literacy in middle school. They aim, among other things, to increase interest in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and…

The Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) technique is nowadays the most popular programming technique among tertiary education institutions. However, learning OOP is a cognitively demanding task for undergraduate students. Several difficulties and misconceptions have been recorded in the literature for both OOP concepts and languages, mainly Java.…

Teaching is the process of conveying knowledge and skills to learners. It involves preventing misunderstandings or correcting misconceptions that learners have acquired. Thus, effective teaching relies on solid knowledge of the discipline, but also a good grasp of where learners are likely to trip up or misunderstand. In programming, there is much…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…

Low performance of nontechnical engineering students in programming courses is a problem that remains unsolved. Over the years, many authors have tried to identify the multiple causes for that failure, but there is unanimity on the fact that motivation is a key factor for the acquisition of knowledge by students. To better understand motivation, a…

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…

Abstraction is one of the most fundamental ideas in computer science (CS), and as such, according to Bruner, it should be taught spirally, starting as early as possible and revisited at every level of education. However, teaching CS abstraction to novices is a very challenging task, and CS educational research has often demonstrated students'…

Contemporary research has explored educational robotics, but it has not examined the development of computational thinking in the context of programming embodied interactions. Apart from the goal of the robot and how the robot will interact with its environment, another important aspect that should be taken into consideration is whether and how…

SQL is taught in almost all university level database courses, yet SQL has received relatively little attention in educational research. In this study, we present a database management system independent categorization of SQL query errors that students make in an introductory database course. We base the categorization on previous literature,…