Background and Context: While biology has strong female representation, computer science is the least gender equitable of the STEM fields. A better understanding of the barriers that keep women out of computational fields will help overcome those barriers to create a more diverse workforce. Objective: We investigated the complexities that…

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

Trigonometry is an important part of secondary school mathematics, but it is usually challenging for students to understand and learn. Since trigonometry is learned and used at a university level in many fields, like physics or geodesy, it is important to have an insight into students' trigonometry knowledge before the beginning of the university…

The Purpose of this dissertation is to explore undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students' writing processes and transfer as they occur in the process of completing a writing assignment in a CS course. In particular, I observe and analyze students' writing processes, and investigate examples of writing knowledge transfer from prior and…

Among students and lecturers of Computer Science (CS)-related subjects, there is often anecdotal talk that Frustration Tolerance (FT) is a requirement for success in CS studies or that students would learn it during their studies. In order to relate the anecdotal perception and the psychological concept of FT and to explore the anecdotal…

Contribution: This study evaluates the generalizability of previously identified perceptions among engineering students of assessments in introductory programming (CS1). The students' perceptions of their instructors' and teaching assistants' (TAs) roles in these assessments are also studied, and differences based on prior programming experience,…

The purpose of this research was to examine college students' conceptions of learning computer science and approaches to learning computer science and to examine the relationships among these two important constructs and possible moderating factors. Student data (N = 193) were collected using the conceptions of learning computer science and the…

In this research, a scale was developed to determine the programming-oriented computational thinking skills of university students. The participants were 360 students studying in various departments at different universities in Turkey for computer programming. The scale consists of 33 items under conceptual knowledge, algorithmic thinking, and…

This dissertation describes an experiment to investigate how learners with different levels of background in computer science learn core concepts of computer science, in particular, algorithms. We designed a study to focus on cognitive task analysis for eliciting the empirical mental elements of learning two graph algorithms. Cognitive workload…

Recent years have witnessed a growing demand for business analytics-oriented curricula. This paper presents the implementation of an introductory Python course at a business university and the attempt to elevate the course's relevance by introducing data analytics topics. The results from a survey of 64 undergraduate students of the course are…

Decades of research on engagement, retention, and under-representation in STEM conclude that a better understanding of learner development as a long-term, social process is needed. Social identity theory is increasingly used to understand the interplay between individual development and social structure. The present report summarises findings from…

Background and Context: Flipped classrooms are becoming more widely adopted across engineering higher education contexts. In degree programs where enrollment is increasing and undergraduate curricula are packed with content, pedagogies that allow more time for actively participate in classroom activities are being highly sought after to aid in…

The impact of a novice programmer's first language on their subsequent achievement in further computing education has been the subject of much study in the field of computer science education. Our research is a retrospective study of more than 10,000 undergraduate students enrolled in CS1 (introduction to computer programming) from 118 US college…

Research in computer-supported collaborative learning has indicated that conversational agents can be pedagogically beneficial when used to scaffold students' online discussions. In this study, we investigate the impact of an agile conversational agent that triggers student dialogue by making interventions based on the academically productive talk…

In this study, we examine the effect of background knowledge and local cohesion on learning from texts. The study is based on construction-integration model. Participants were 176 undergraduate students who read a Computer Science text. Half of the participants read a text of maximum local cohesion and the other a text of minimum local cohesion.…