Studies show that for many years courses teaching computer programming skills to novices have engendered a dislike for programming in many students. The first phase of this study presented identical content in one of three instructional sequences to 34 college students who were programming novices to determine which produced the greatest development of programming expertise. Learning was measured by performance on a Programming Assessment given immediately after the intervention, and effort and difficulty were self-rated during the instruction. There was no significant difference among the groups in Programming Assessment scores, and overall self-rated effort and difficulty of the instruction did not vary simply by rearranging the order in which the major elements were presented. However, instructional units that covered programming syntax skills and structures were rated by all groups as requiring significantly less effort and difficulty than units covering plans, and participants in all groups scored significantly higher on syntax skills and structures than on plans. The second phase sought evidence that there were differences in perception and the complexity of knowledge in long term memory between novices and experts programmers by comparing the fifteen top performing participants on the Programming Assessment with three programming experts in chunking a short program and in constructing the central solution statement to four programming problems. Experts chunked programs to twice the levels and twice as fast as novices, indicating differences in the mental organization of novices and experts. The implications of these results are discussed.
This study focused on the development and multivariate analysis of a university version of the Charles F. Kettering Climate Scale, a popular measure that is widely used to gather data for climate assessment and educational planning. A total of 707 university students at a campus in the southwestern United States completed the scale. A second-order analysis shows areas of generalization across the primary components.
Electronic documents have many advantages, but they also have the serious disadvantages. One of them is difficulty in preservation.A method should be developed for preserving electronic documents in their original form that is independent of the hardware or software standards used.
This retrospective study of the performance of Computer Information Systems (CIS) students from between 1987 and 2010 found evidence that remedial math, reading, and writing courses can significantly increase student mean GPA, persistence, and completion in a CIS program. Remediation was most effective when verbal as well as mathematical deficiencies were addressed, and the performance of fully remediated students was indistinguishable as a group from students not requiring remediation.
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