Background and Context: Auto-graders are praised by novice students learning to program, as they provide them with automatic feedback about their problem-solving process. However, some students often make random changes when they have errors in their code, without engaging in deliberate thinking about the cause of the error. Objective: To…

Background and context: Emotions are ubiquitous in academic settings and affect learning strategies, motivation to persevere, and academic outcomes, however they have not figured prominently in research on learning to program at the university level. Objective: To summarize the current knowledge available on the effect of emotions on students…

Background and Context: We explore the potential for understanding the processes involved in students' programming based on studying their behaviour and dialogue with each other and "conversations" with their programs. Objective: Our aim is to explore how a perspective of inquiry can be used as a point of departure for insights into how…

Background and Context: Elementary computer science (CS) can be engaging and challenging for some students with disabilities who struggle with complex problem solving. Objective: This study examined academic engagement of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in elementary CS instruction. Method: A mixed methods case study was used to study…

In higher education, quality feedback for students is regarded as one of the main contributors to improve student learning. Feedback to support students' development into self-regulated learners, who set their own goals, self-monitor their actual performance according to these goals, and adjust learning strategies if necessary, is seen as an…

Motivation and metacognition are strongly intertwined, with learners high in self-efficacy more likely to use a variety of self-regulatory learning strategies, as well as to persist longer on challenging tasks. The aim of the research was to improve the learner's focus on the process and experience of problem-solving while using an Intelligent…

In Java, "System.out.printf" and "String.format" consume a specialised kind of string commonly known as a format string. In our study of first-year students at the Ateneo de Manila University, we discovered that format strings present a substantial challenge for novice programmers. Focusing on their first laboratory we found…

Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; the process that leads to a student's first executable program is not well understood. At the University of Kent we have begun to explore the "compilation behaviours" of novice programmers, or the behaviours that students exhibit while authoring code; in our initial study, we have…