Despite growing interest in spaced retrieval methods, a research gap has been discovered, with insufficient data to support best practises in year-one science. After analysing five systematic action cycles, four interrelated themes emerged: dual coding, cognitive load, peer communication, and feedback-driven metacognition. While literature…

Background and Context: Multiple studies report that experienced instructors lack consensus on the difficulty of programming tasks for novices. However, adequately gauging task difficulty is needed for alignment: to select and structure tasks in order to assess what students can and cannot do. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine…

Drawing on research in mathematics and science education that has supported student higher-level thinking in K-12 classrooms, we sought to classify the ways of thinking and reasoning supported by robotics coding tasks. As part of a larger project, we examined coding tasks implemented in elementary school classrooms and analyzed ways of thinking…

Digital learning increasingly makes use of realistic visualizations, although realism can be demanding for learners. Color coding is a popular way of helping learners understand visualizations and has been found to aid in learning with detailed visualizations. However, previous research has shown that color coding must not always be an effective…

This study aims to evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities in certain numerical analysis problem: solving ordinary differential equations. The methodology which is developed in order to conduct this research takes into account the following mathematical abilities (defined according to National Centre for Education Statistics): Conceptual Understanding,…

The aim of the study encompasses three primary objectives: (1) To examine the capability of children of varying ages to reproduce increasingly complex rhythms through hand-clapping and drumming; (2) To explore the ability of children of different ages to notate increasingly complex rhythms; and (3) To investigate the impact of age on children's…

Improving code while preserving its functionality is a common task in the hi-tech industry. Yet students have difficulties improving an algorithm's run-time complexity by an order of magnitude. The paper focuses on assessing students' abilities in this area. We designed a Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy, using software…

Educators have long questioned why some students can experience achievement more easily in some school subjects/curriculum, but not in others. We argue that learners cannot ignore navigating two key features inherent within every curriculum--its cognitive demands as well as its opportunities for access to knowledge that are the twin foci of this…

This paper designs and develops a computer programming learning system for total beginners and those who have no programming experience. The traditional computer programming learning systems require prior knowledge about variables, their types, operators for arithmetic calculations and relational calculations etc., for adopting a wide range of…

This paper explores a major theoretical framework from psychology, Dual Process Theory (DPT), which has received surprisingly little attention in the computing education literature. DPT postulates the existence of two qualitatively different kinds of cognitive systems, a fast, intuitive "System 1" and a slow, reflective "System…

Concurrency is a complex to learn topic that is becoming more and more relevant, such that many undergraduate Computer Science curricula are introducing it in introductory programming courses. This paper investigates the combined use of Sonic Pi and Team-Based Learning to mitigate the difficulties in early exposure to concurrency. Sonic Pi, a…

Novice programmers need well-designed instruction and assessment informed by research and critical perspectives to conquer the historical challenges associated with completing introductory computer programming courses successfully. These issues include high dropout and failure rates, the struggle to acquire and retain basic programming knowledge,…

Educators who teach programming subjects are often wondering "which programming language should I teach first?" The debate behind this question has a long history and coming up with a definite answer to this question would be farfetched. Nonetheless, several efforts can be identified in the literature wherein pros and cons of mainstream…

Automatically identifying struggling students learning to program can assist teachers in providing timely and focused help. This work presents a new deep-learning language model for predicting "bug-fix-time", the expected duration between when a software bug occurs and the time it will be fixed by the student. Such information can guide…

Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…