All primary school children in England are required to write computer programs and learn about computational thinking. There are moves in other countries to this effect such as the U.S. K-12 Computer Science Framework (CSF) for development. Debates on how to program and what constitutes computational thinking are ongoing. Here we report on a study…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals…

The aim of this study was to develop a coding scheme rooted in the Knowledge Building model, named Conversational Functions for Knowledge Building (CF4KB), to analyze students' interactions in an online undergraduate course. In order to develop the coding scheme, we analyzed students discourse and identified the kinds of "Conversational…

This article presents an experiment with a group of secondary school music students in Spain. We used music score sheets enriched with Quick Response codes as a resource for the practice required to play a musical instrument. The first group (n = 56) was compared with another group (n = 56) that used traditional resources (textbooks and compact…

To provide personalized help to students who are working on code-writing problems, we introduce a data-driven tutoring system, ITAP (Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Programming). ITAP uses state abstraction, path construction, and state reification to automatically generate personalized hints for students, even when given states that have not…

This commentary on the special issue, entitled "Models and Tools for Systems Learning and Instruction," highlights the accomplishments of the papers in this collection. It also points to some avenues for further strengthening research on promoting systems understanding. Collectively, the papers make advances in our understanding of how…

As the cyber security landscape dynamically evolves and security professionals work to keep apace, modern-day educators face the issue of equipping a new generation for this dynamic landscape. With cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities substantially increased over the past years in frequency and severity, it is important to design and build secure…

Design within primary and secondary schools has been increasingly emphasized over the past decade. As a response to this increased interest, qualitative research examining students' cognitive processes involved in the practices of design has been on the rise. These studies have commonly employed the concurrent think-aloud research methodology to…

Background and Context: There are studies which indicate that computer programming supports high-level abilities for everyone such as creative thinking, questioning, problem solving and critical thinking which are considered within the scope of 21st-century abilities. Objective: The current experimental study was carried out to put forth the…

This paper presents a learning outcomes-based methodology to produce a summative assessment to use in any course at any educational level. It takes into consideration the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) to define the learning outcomes, Bloom's taxonomy to define the assessment questions and the QR code to help managing large class size.…

The main purposes of this research are to describe the volume, features and trends characterizing block transfer and degree partnership pathways in the British Columbia (BC) Transfer System (BCTS); to determine existing business practices that may impact data on degree pathways; and to identify successful practices that may assist institutions in…

Students in introductory computer science courses, are learning to program. Indeed, most students perceive that learning to code is the central topic explored in the courses. Students spend an enormous amount of time struggling to learn the syntax and understand semantics of a particular language. Instructors spend a similar amount of time reading…

This study examined student learning outcomes from a middle school computer science (CS) curriculum developed through a researcher and practitioner partnership (RPP) project. The curriculum is based on students creating mobile apps that serve community and social good. We collected two sets of data from 294 students in three urban districts: (1)…

Despite the benefits of teaching computational thinking (CT) and applying coding tools in schools, many teachers feel unprepared to use these technologies. Hence, we introduced CT concepts and coding tools to pre-service teachers (n=36; 17 in online class and 19 in in-person class), equipping them with digital competencies through activities with…

The COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting in-person research a health risk for interviewers and participants. Near the start of the pandemic, many universities pivoted to emergency remote teaching where courses were delivered remotely in observance of safety guidelines. The safety guidelines also necessitated that research be done remotely. We…