The Persistent Effect of Pre-College Computing Experience on College CS Course Grades

Alvarado, Christine; Umbelino, Gustavo; Minnes, Mia

doi:10.1145/3159450.3159508

Cited by 35 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Having previous programming experience was a strong factor in our study: it was found to be significantly correlated with extrinsic motivation, CS career orientation and self-efficacy. This strong effect of prior experience has also be found to apply to CS1 courses [2,15,20]. In our experiment, there might be an additional reason for this observation: that programming experience, before our experimental courses, could have been obtained only through home-based or extra-curricular activities (we have confirmed that no previous programming lessons were given to the participants within the school environment).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

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Early Programming Education and Career Orientation

Aivaloglou

Hermans²

2019

Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Programming education currently begins at the elementary school age. In this paper we are exploring what affects the learning performance of young students in programming classes. We present the results collected during an eight-week experimental Scratch programming course run in elementary schools. We emphasize factors that have been found to affect learning performance in adult students, including self-efficacy and motivation, and measure how they affect students of this age group. We further explore the students' view of programming as a career path, and measure the effects of the course, their performance, and the stereotypes that they assume for computer scientists. We find that students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and previous programming experience are important factors, being strongly correlated with their self-efficacy and their inclination towards a CS career. For female students only, we also find CS career orientation to be strongly correlated with their self-efficacy. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Computing education; Gender;

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…The literature has suggested several factors that influence learning performance in programming. These include age [8,16,18], previous programming experience [2,15,20] and self-efficacy [12,15,17]. Self-efficacy represents the belief that one can successfully execute behaviours required to produce a desired outcome [4].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Programming Education and Career Orientation

Aivaloglou

Hermans²

2019

Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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“…Consequently, which approaches are taken by students, and whether a certain approach is desirable to be stimulated, are important from the perspective of the aim of a group assignment as well. Furthermore, the starting point of division of labour is likely to be highly prevalent in computing education, because of the different levels of prior knowledge and expertise that computing students can have [18], [19].…”

Section: A Collaboration Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Groupwork in the field of computing education has particular characteristics that can influence how students approach and experience their group assignments. These characteristics include the fact that students enter computer science courses with varying levels of prior programming experience [18], [19] , that they could be given the opportunity to apply practices like pair programming in their assignments and, finally, that within software projects source code repositories can be used as collaboration platforms, making process data [20] available. The way in which students approach their group assignment and the workload, which often involves some division of labour [21]- [23], might be affected by these particular aspects of computing education.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Does What? Work Division and Allocation Strategies of Computer Science Student Teams

Meulen

Aivaloglou

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)

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Collaboration skills are important for future software engineers. In computer science education, these skills are often practiced through group assignments, where students develop software collaboratively. The approach that students take in these assignments varies widely, but often involves a division of labour. It can then be argued whether collaboration still takes place. The discipline of computing education is especially interesting in this context, because some of its specific features (such as the variation in entry skill level and the use of source code repositories as collaboration platforms) are likely to influence the approach taken within groupwork. The aim of this research is to gain insight into the work division and allocation strategies applied by computer science students during group assignments. To this end, we interviewed twenty students of four universities. The thematic analysis shows that students tend to divide up the workload to enable working independently, with pair programming and code reviews being often employed. Motivated primarily by grade and efficiency factors, students choose and allocate tasks primarily based on their prior expertise and preferences. Based on our findings, we argue that the setup of group assignments can limit students' motivation for practicing new software engineering skills, and that interventions are needed towards encouraging experimentation and learning.Index Terms-Computing education, group projects, teamwork, programming I. In t r o d u c t io nCourses in computer science curricula often involve software engineering projects that are assigned to groups of students. Group assignments are commonly the first experiences that computer science students gain in developing software collaboratively. Through group assignments, students get the opportunity to work on software projects that are of larger scale than individual course projects can be. At the same time, group projects enable students to practice their collaboration skills [1], which are important in the software development industry [2]-[4], with current industrial trends promoting cooperative working techniques such as shared code ownership and pair programming [5]. However, even though collaboration and teamwork skills are important for the next generation of software engineers, it has been found that communication and teamwork skills are areas where graduating computer science students frequently fall short of the expectations and work requirements of industry [6], [7].Research in the area of group assignments has highlighted their advantages and disadvantages related to labour market preparation [8]-[12]. Researched topics include the formation

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“…Students with less pre-college or extracurricular computing experiences may have fewer of these practical skills and less experience learning on their own. Such students may be at an academic disadvantage or feel intimidated 1,2 . Realizing this gap motivated us to revise a key introductory course in our curriculum.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incorporating Practical Computing Skills into a Supplemental CS2 Problem-solving Course

Ellis

Amelink

Edwards

et al.

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

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where he has been teaching since 1996. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Caltech, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer and information science from The Ohio State University. His research interests include computer science education, software testing, software engineering, and programming languages. He is the project lead for Web-CAT, the most widely used open-source automated grading system in the world. Web-CAT is known for allowing instructors to grade students based on how well they test their own code. In addition, his research group has produced a number of other open-source tools used in classrooms at many other institutions. Currently, he is researching innovative for giving feedback to students as they work on assignments to provide a more welcoming experience for students, recognizing the effort they put in and the accomplishments they make as they work on solutions, rather than simply looking at whether the student has finished what is required. The goals of his research are to strengthen growth mindset beliefs while encouraging deliberate practice, self-checking, and skill improvement as students work.

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The Persistent Effect of Pre-College Computing Experience on College CS Course Grades

Cited by 35 publications

References 22 publications

Early Programming Education and Career Orientation

Early Programming Education and Career Orientation

Who Does What? Work Division and Allocation Strategies of Computer Science Student Teams

Incorporating Practical Computing Skills into a Supplemental CS2 Problem-solving Course

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