Research has frequently demonstrated negative effects of placing students into developmental education, but very little inquiry has considered the impact of placing students into different levels of non-developmental coursework. The present study explored this issue within sequenced pairs of STEM gateway courses using doubly-robust propensity…

Contribution: An approach of integrating financial literacy into an introductory programming course is introduced. New learning materials are developed and the impact of the approach on motivating students and improving learning outcomes are evaluated using mixed methods. Background: More than two-thirds of college students in the U.S. graduate…

Research has repeatedly shown self-efficacy to be associated with course outcomes in CS and across other fields. CS education research has documented this and has developed CS-specific self-efficacy measurement instruments, but to date there have been only a few studies examining interventions intended to improve students' self-efficacy in CS, and…

Purpose: Programming education is being rapidly transformed by generative AI tools and educators must determine how best to support students in this context. This study aims to explore the experiences of programming educators and students to inform future education provision. Design/methodology/approach: Twelve students and six members of faculty…

An introductory survey course in software engineering is now required at many accredited undergraduate institutions in the United States. The usual presentation of material consists of student projects that showcase design, development, and testing methodologies. While this approach does provide a foundation, students are left without professional…

The role of teacher agency in professional learning has been the subject of several qualitative studies but has not yet been tested in an experimental setting. To provide causal evidence of the impact of teacher agency on the effectiveness of professional learning, we conducted a preregistered randomized controlled trial in an online computer…

Computational thinking (CT) involves breaking a problem into smaller components and solving it using algorithmic thinking and abstraction. CT is no longer exclusively for computer scientists but for everyone. While CT does not necessarily require programming, learning programming to enhance CT skills at a young age can help shape the next…

Learning to program requires the development of multiple skills including critical thinking, problem-solving, as well as learning the syntax and semantics of the programming language. For novices, to acquire all these skills is considered a challenging and difficult task. They have to focus on both problem-solving strategies and the syntax and…

Information systems courses must adapt to meet the unprecedented demand for well-trained information security (InfoSec) professionals, but they cannot competently fill this gap without also ensuring that students are fluent and confident in foundational skills, both technical and behavioral. How to teach behavioral topics in InfoSec management is…

Adding gaming elements to conventional teaching methodologies has gained a lot of attention because of its ability to incorporate an engaging, motivating, and fun-based environment. As a result, learners' dedication and performance are also better. Unfortunately, current gamification models do not consider the effect of different levels of…

Programming is an essential part of the curriculum of computer science non-major students. The motivation for the various elements of interdisciplinary degrees is often very low in computer science, which faces a gender gap as well. Differences between study courses and gender in confidence, attitude, student numbers, and motivation in computer…

Background and Context: Computer Science attrition rates (in the western world) are very concerning, with a large number of students failing to progress each year. It is well acknowledged that a significant factor of this attrition, is the students' difficulty to master the introductory programming module, often referred to as CS1. Objective: The…

We performed a controlled experiment comparing a C and a Python Introductory Programming course. Three faculty members at University of Campinas, Brazil, taught the same CS1 course for the same majors in two different semesters, one version in Python and one in C, with a total of 391 students involved in the experiment. We measured the dropout…

Purpose: Nowadays, when mobile devices are actively evolving and penetrating the various spheres of human activity they have a potential to modernize and facilitate the sphere of IT education as well. This paper aims to test the hypothesis stating that introduction of mobile technology to the college-level database course for future IT specialists…

Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students' performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate…