2009 Proceeding- General Chairs:
- Michael Clancy,
- Michael Caspersen,
- Raymond Lister
We welcome you to Berkeley and to the Fifth International Computing Education Research Workshop, ICER 2009, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). This year's workshop continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of contributions to the computing education research discipline.
The call for papers attracted 24 submissions. All papers were double-blind peer-reviewed by members of the international program committee. After the reviewing, 13 papers (54%) were accepted for inclusion in the conference, written by authors across nine countries: Australia, Finland, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Sweden, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The papers spanned a wide variety of topics, including tools and tool use; conceptions, preconceptions, and misconceptions; attitudes; collaborative learning; research categorization; teacher adaptation to new paradigms; and broad-scale adoption of CS innovation. The program also includes a keynote address by Marcia C. Linn outlining what recent research in the learning sciences might offer to computing education researchers and course designers.
Proceeding Downloads
Learning to teach computer programming
What does recent research in the learning sciences have to offer computing education researchers and course designers? Over the past 50 years, course designers have learned a great deal about how to teach computer programming. Programming courses have ...
Comparing effective and ineffective behaviors of student programmers
- Stephen H. Edwards,
- Jason Snyder,
- Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones,
- Anthony Allevato,
- Dongkwan Kim,
- Betsy Tretola
This paper reports on a quantitative evaluation of five years of data collected in the first three programming courses at Virginia Tech. The dataset involves a total of 89,879 assignment submissions by 1,101 different students. Assignment results were ...
Empirical comparison of objects-first and objects-later
In this paper, results of an empirical comparison of objects-first vs. objects-later are presented and discussed. The study was carefully designed to align the two approaches so that the comparison is focused on the main difference between the two ...
Quality of peer assessment in CS1
While popularity of peer assessment in Computer Science has increased in recent years, the validity of peer assessed marks remain a significant concern to instructors and source of anxiety to students. We report here on a large-scale study (1,500 ...
Flexible, reusable tools for studying novice programmers
We would like more computer science education research studies to be easily replicable. Unfortunately, the tools used for data collection are often too specialized, unstable, or just plain unavailable for use in experimental replication. Here, we ...
In-service teachers learning of a new paradigm: a case study
Due to a reform in the Israeli CS high school curricula, in-service teachers who studied and taught procedural programming are now required to cope with the new paradigm of OOP. In this paper we describe a case study in which we traced the difficulties ...
Commonsense computing (episode 5): algorithm efficiency and balloon testing
- Robert McCartney,
- Dennis J. Bouvier,
- Tzu-Yi Chen,
- Gary Lewandowski,
- Kate Sanders,
- Beth Simon,
- Tammy VanDeGrift
This paper investigates what students understand about algorithm efficiency before receiving any formal instruction on the topic. We gave students a challenging search problem and two solutions, then asked them to identify the more efficient solution ...
Computer science innovation in Thailand
This paper reports on an empirical qualitative study of computer science education in Thailand following an aid project. The project was attempting to improve teaching quality at a time of significant change in educational delivery worldwide (1999--2004)...
Coarse-grained detection of student frustration in an introductory programming course
We attempt to automatically detect student frustration, at a coarse-grained level, using measures distilled from student behavior within a learning environment for introductory programming. We find that each student's average level of frustration across ...
On the nature of student defensiveness: theory and feedback from a software design course
Deeply challenging, educationally critical discipline content often resides in the realm of the existentially unfamiliar, that which is initially experienced as unknown--and unknowable. By definition, student encounters with this content lead to a ...
Analysis of research into the teaching and learning of programming
This paper presents an analysis of research papers about programming education that were published in computing education conferences in the years 2005 to 2008. We employed Simon's classification scheme to identify the papers of interest from the ICER, ...
For me, programming is ...
Fun, interesting, hard, rewarding, and challenging: these are the most frequent responses of 697 students from five institutions at the end of a first programming course. Student experience with introductory programming courses is of interest to the ...
A closer look at tracing, explaining and code writing skills in the novice programmer
The way in which novice programmers learn to write code is of considerable interest to computing education researchers. One research approach to understanding how beginners acquire their programming abilities has been to look at student performance in ...
Student transformations: are they computer scientists yet?
We examine the changes in the ways computing students view their field as they learn, as reported by the students themselves in short written biographies. In many ways, these changes result in students thinking and acting more like computer scientists ...
Index Terms
Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop