This article describes a new and innovative open co-op program for MIS/IS students. The program, Global Enterprise Technology Immersion Experience (GET IE), has a global enterprise focus that is integrated with hands-on experiential work-based learning to provide a context in which students are stimulated to utilize their classroom knowledge. The…

Learning the syntax, semantics, and concepts behind software engineering can be a challenging task for many individuals. This paper examines the Alice 3 software, a three-dimensional visual environment for teaching programming concepts, to determine if it is an effective tool for improving student achievement, raising self-efficacy, and engaging…

This dissertation presents the design, development and short-term evaluation of an embodied conversational agent designed to mentor human users. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) was created and programmed to mentor African American computer science majors on their decision to pursue graduate study in computing. Before constructing the ECA,…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

Language modeling is one of many problems in language processing that have to grapple with naturally high ambient dimensions. Even in large datasets, the number of unseen sequences is overwhelmingly larger than the number of observed ones, posing clear challenges for estimation. Although existing methods for building smooth language models tend to…

In recent years, schools (as well as universities) have added cyber security to their computer science curricula. This topic is still new for most of the current teachers, who would normally have a standard computer science background. Therefore the teachers are trained and then teaching their students what they have just learned. In order to…

This article describes the importance that high school computer science teachers place on a teachers' professional learning community designed around an inquiry- and equity-oriented approach for broadening participation in computing. Using grounded theory to analyze four years of teacher surveys and interviews from the Exploring Computer Science…

Web development is an important component in the curriculum of computer science and information systems areas. However, it is generally considered difficult to learn among students. In this study,we examined factors that could influence students' perceptions of accomplishment and enjoyment and their intention to learn in the web development…

Computer aided assessment systems enable the collection of exact time and date information on students' activity on a course. These activity patterns reflect students' study habits and these study habits further predict students' likelihood to pass or fail a course. By identifying such patterns, those who design the courses can enforce positive…

Recently, there has been a trend towards adding a multidisciplinary or multicultural element to traditional monodisciplinary project courses in computing and engineering. In this article, we examine the implications of multidisciplinarity for students' learning experiences during a one-semester project course for real customers. We use a…

Business intelligence (BI) and healthcare analytics are the emerging technologies that provide analytical capability to help healthcare industry improve service quality, reduce cost, and manage risks. However, such component on analytical healthcare data processing is largely missed from current healthcare information technology (HIT) or health…

A cluster of research has been conducted in higher education to investigate the affordances (action possibilities) and the influence information and communication technologies (ICT) may have on students' learning experiences and outcomes. Such studies have given rise to the implementation of a wide range of educational frameworks with a great deal…

The Speak Up National Research Project annually polls K-12 students, parents and educators about the role of technology for learning in and out of school. For the past twelve years, Project Tomorrow's® annual Speak Up Research Project has provided schools and districts nationwide and throughout the globe with new insights into how today's students…

Computational thinking has been gaining new impetus in the academic community and in K-12 level education. Scratch is a visual programming environment that can be utilized to teach and learn introductory computing concepts. There are some studies investigating the effectiveness of Scratch for K-12 level education. However, studies that have been…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the Scratch and Lego Mindstorms Ev3 programming activities on academic achievement with respect to computer programming, and on the problem-solving and logical-mathematical thinking skills of students. This study was a semi-experimental, pretest-posttest study with two experimental groups and…