Educators are faced with many challenging questions in designing an e�ective curriculum. What pre... more 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...
Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programm... more Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programming units are high, as are attrition rates from IT courses. Case studies were conducted in 2007 involving Queensland University of Technology (QUT) introductory programming students who took part in weekly interviews and focus groups, and responded to questionnaires. Students divulged details relating to their attitude and approach to study, together with the level of confidence they had in their ability to learn to program. Four of the case studies are included in this paper which portrays students with varying levels of confidence motivation, determination, attitude and study ethic, and how they each struggle to learn to program. The purpose of the studies was to determine to what extent each of these factors has an influence on student learning outcomes. The studies focus on the people rather than the more traditionally studied cognitive difficulties of learning to program. The data c...
Learning to program is very difficult for many students and we have seen failure rates in Queensl... more Learning to program is very difficult for many students and we have seen failure rates in Queensland University of Technology (QUT) introductory programming units at over 40%. The reasons students struggle in this domain has been a widely debated topic for many years with little prospect of a 'silver bullet'. We do know that expert computer programmers operate at a
Proceedings of the 14th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2012), Jan 30, 2012
The ICT degrees in most Australian universities have a sequence of up to three programming subjec... more 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 s... more 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 introduc... more 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..
Educators are faced with many challenging questions in designing an e�ective curriculum. What pre... more 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...
Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programm... more Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programming units are high, as are attrition rates from IT courses. Case studies were conducted in 2007 involving Queensland University of Technology (QUT) introductory programming students who took part in weekly interviews and focus groups, and responded to questionnaires. Students divulged details relating to their attitude and approach to study, together with the level of confidence they had in their ability to learn to program. Four of the case studies are included in this paper which portrays students with varying levels of confidence motivation, determination, attitude and study ethic, and how they each struggle to learn to program. The purpose of the studies was to determine to what extent each of these factors has an influence on student learning outcomes. The studies focus on the people rather than the more traditionally studied cognitive difficulties of learning to program. The data c...
Learning to program is very difficult for many students and we have seen failure rates in Queensl... more Learning to program is very difficult for many students and we have seen failure rates in Queensland University of Technology (QUT) introductory programming units at over 40%. The reasons students struggle in this domain has been a widely debated topic for many years with little prospect of a 'silver bullet'. We do know that expert computer programmers operate at a
Proceedings of the 14th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2012), Jan 30, 2012
The ICT degrees in most Australian universities have a sequence of up to three programming subjec... more 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 s... more 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 introduc... more 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..
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Papers by Donna Teague