Donna Teague

Educators are faced with many challenging questions in designing an e�ective curriculum. What prerequisite knowledge do students have before commencing a new subject? At what level of mastery? What is the spread of capabilities between bare-passing students vs. the top-performing group? How does the intended learning specification compare to student performance at the end of a subject? In this paper we present a conceptual model that helps in answering some of these questions. It has the following main capabilities: capturing the learning specification in terms of syllabus topics and outcomes; capturing mastery levels to model progression; capturing the minimal vs. aspirational learning design; capturing confidence and reliability metrics for each of these mappings; and finally, comparing and re ecting on the learning specification against actual student performance. We present a web-based implementation of the model, and validate it by mapping the �nal exams from four programming s...

The ICT degrees in most Australian universities have a sequence of up to three programming subjects, or units. BABELnot is an ALTC-funded project that will document the academic standards associated with those three subjects in the six participating universities and, if possible, at other universities. This will necessitate the development of a rich framework for describing the learning goals associated with programming. It will also be necessary to benchmark exam questions that are mapped onto this framework. As part of ...

At the previous conference in this series, Corney, Lister and Teague presented research results showing relationships between code writing, code tracing and code explaining, from as early as week 3 of semester. We concluded that the problems some students face in learning to program start very early in the semester. In this paper we report on our replication of that experiment, at two institutions, where one is the same as the original institution. In some cases, we did not find the same relationship between explaining code and writing code, but we believe this was because our teachers discussed the code in lectures between the two tests. Apart from that exception, our replication results at both institutions are consistent with our original study.

The computing education literature shows some recent interest in summative assessment in introductory programming, with papers analysing final examinations and other papers proposing small sets of examination questions that might be used in multiple institutions as part of a benchmarking exercise. This paper reports on a project to expand the set of questions suitable for use in benchmarking exercises, and at the same time to identify guidelines for writing good examination questions for introductory programming courses – and, by implication, practices to avoid when writing questions. The paper presents a set of ten questions deemed suitable for use in the exams of multiple courses, and invites readers to use the questions in their own exams. It also presents the guidelines that emerged from the study, in the hope that they will be helpful to computing educators writing exams for their own courses..

Poor student engagement and high failure rates in first year units were addressed at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a course restructure involving a fresh approach to introducing programming. Students? first taste of programming in the new course focused less on the language and syntax, and more on problem solving and design, and the role of programming in

2012) Using neo-Piagetian theory, formative in-Class tests and think alouds to better understand stu-dent thinking : a preliminary report on computer programming. In Proceed-ings of 2012 Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) Annual Conference, Melbourne, Vic.

At the previous conference in this series, Corney, Lister and Teague presented research results showing relationships between code writing, code tracing and code explaining, from as early as week 3 of semester. We concluded that the problems some students face in learning to program start very early in the semester. In this paper we report on our replication of that experiment, at two institutions, where one is the same as the original institution. In some cases, we did not find the same relationship between explaining code and writing ...

Recent research on novice programmers has suggested that they pass through neo-Piagetian stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational stages, before eventually reaching programming competence at the formal operational stage. This paper presents empirical results in support of this neo-Piagetian perspective. The major novel contributions of this paper are empirical results for some exam questions aimed at testing novices for the concrete operational abilities to reason with quantities that are conserved, ...

Poor student engagement and high failure rates in first year units were addressed at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a course restructure involving a fresh approach to introducing programming. Students? first taste of programming in the new course focused less on the language and syntax, and more on problem solving and design, and the role of programming in relation to other technologies they are likely to encounter in their studies. In effect, several technologies that have historically been compartmentalised ...