Abstract
Students often struggle with advanced computing courses, and comparatively few studies have looked into the reasons for this. It seems that learners do not master the most basic concepts, or forget them between courses. If so, remedial practice could improve learning, but instructors rightly will not use scarce time for this without strong evidence. Based on personal observation, program tracing seems to be an important pre-requisite skill, but there is yet little research that provides evidence for this observation. To investigate this, our group will create theory-based assessments on how tracing knowledge affects learning of advanced topics, such as data structures, algorithms, and concurrency. This working group will identify relevant concepts in advanced courses, then conceptually analyze their pre-requisites and where an imagined student with some tracing difficulties would encounter barriers. The group will use this theory to create instructor-usable assessments for advanced topics that also identify issues caused by poor pre-requisite knowledge. These assessments may then be used at the start and end of advanced courses to evaluate to what extent students' difficulties with the advanced course originate from poor pre-requisite knowledge.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the ITiCSE '20: 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education0 |
Editors | Michail N. Giannakos, Guttorm Sindre, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Monica Divitini |
Number of pages | 2 |
Place of Publication | New York, NY |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Publication date | 2020 |
Pages | 506-507 |
Article number | 160611 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450368742 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | 25th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. ITiSE 2020 [Virtual Format] - Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway Duration: 17 Jun 2020 → 18 Jun 2020 Conference number: 25 https://iticse.acm.org/ https://iticse.acm.org/ITiCSE2020/ |
Conference
Conference | 25th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. ITiSE 2020 [Virtual Format] |
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Number | 25 |
Location | Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) |
Country/Territory | Norway |
City | Trondheim |
Period | 17/06/2020 → 18/06/2020 |
Internet address |