Graded Troubleshooting (GTS) is a powerful routine that teachers can use easily to engender students' metacognitive thinking and boost their understanding of mathematics concepts and procedures. This article describes a new GTS activity designed to prompt students to efficiently exploit worked examples when asked to diagnose erroneous examples…

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…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

Software vulnerabilities have become a severe cybersecurity issue. There are numerous resources of industry best practices available, but it is still challenging to effectively teach secure coding practices. The resources are not designed for classroom usage because the amount of information is overwhelming for students. There are efforts in…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

This study aims to provide a comprehensive and in-depth investigation of the debugging process in programming teaching in terms of cognitive and metacognitive aspects, based on programming students who demonstrate low, medium, and high programming performance and to propose instructional strategies for scaffolding novice learners in an effective…

In face-to-face conversations, speaker transitions (or hand-offs) are typically seamless. In computer-mediated communication settings, speaker hand-offs can be a bit more challenging. This paper presents the results of a study of audio communication problems that occur in an online synchronous course, and how, and by whom, those problems are…

For supporting the education of debugging skills, we propose a system for generating error correction questions of programs and checking the correctness. The system generates HTML files for answering questions and CGI programs for checking answers. Learners read and answer questions on Web browsers. For management of error injection, we have…

This study compared students' learning in troubleshooting and problem solving activities. The troubleshooting activities provided students with solutions to conceptual problems in the form of refutation texts; namely, solutions that portray common misconceptions, refute them, and then present the accepted scientific ideas. They required students…

This paper considers how students deal with malfunctions that occur during the use of web conferencing systems in learning arrangements. In a survey among participants in online courses that make use of a web-conferencing system (N = 129), the relationship between a preference for internal or external locus of control and the perception of…

Morgante et al. (in press) find inconsistencies in the time reporting of a Tobii T60XL eye tracker. Their study raises important questions about the use of the Tobii T-series in particular, and various software and hardware in general, in different infant eye tracking paradigms. It leaves open the question of the source of the inconsistencies.…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Troubleshooting skills are integral for the Information Technology professional. In order to address faculty concerns that students were not effectively learning required troubleshooting skills, a standardized troubleshooting methodology (the DECSAR Method) was created and integrated into the standard curriculum of a college information technology…

We report on responses to a series of four questions designed to identify pre-existing abilities related to debugging and troubleshooting experiences of novice students before they begin programming instruction. The focus of these questions include general troubleshooting, bug location, exploring unfamiliar environments, and describing students'…

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java…