Seven graduate students in a seminar on classroom computing received instruction in LOGO programming. Programming protocols were collected periodically and examined for errors and misconceptions; in-depth interviews were conducted in order to understand specific misconceptions better. As novice students transit from instruction to experience in…

An overall schema of interpretation for programming instructors is given, so that the misconceptions students develop in programming can be determined more readily. Types of language-independent and -dependent bugs, how they can be identified, and how to help students overcome them are addressed. (MNS)

This report describes PROUST, a computer-based system for online analyses and understanding of PASCAL programs written by novice programmers, which takes as input a program and a non-algorithmic description of the program requirements and finds the most likely mapping between the requirements and the code. Both the theory and processing techniques…

Describes a computer-assisted research project into the writing errors of English as a second language college students. Sentences with error types and first languages of students were entered into a database and analyzed for the most common errors of all students and the most prevalent patterns within each language group. (Author/SED)

The main method of locating information on the World Wide Web is to use a search engine. Given a set of terms, a search engine will return a list of documents containing those terms. Often, though, this list of documents is extremely large. Unfortunately, there are currently no tools to assist the information seeker in determining whether these…

College administrators are complaining that "Yahoo! Internet Life" magazine used a flawed surveying process and inaccurate data to select the institutions it named in a recent ranking of "American's 100 Most Wired Colleges." Even some institutions faring well in the ranking have concerns about the survey, citing problems with…