Allison Elliott Tew

Tracking an innovation in introductory CS education from a research university to a two-year college

Innovations in teaching and learning computer science education can easily be overly-specific to a given institution, or type of institution. For example, an innovation may require special hardware, or may make assumptions about the background of the students. This paper tracks one such innovation, a multimedia-focused introductory computing course, as it moved from a research-focused university to a public two-year college. At both institutions, the new course resulted in dramatically improved retention. Students at the two-year college were even more motivated and more positive about computing after the course than students at the research university. The results suggest ways of approaching innovation that is easily adaptable to other institutions.

Concept inventories in computer science for the topic discrete mathematics

This report describes concept inventories, specialized assessment instruments that enable educational researchers to investigate student (mis)understandings of concepts in a particular domain. While students experience a concept inventory as a set of multiple-choice items taken as a test, this belies its purpose, its careful development, and its validation. A concept inventory is not intended to be a comprehensive instrument, but rather a tool that probes student comprehension of a carefully selected subset of concepts that give rise to the most common and pervasive mismodelings. The report explains how concept inventories have been developed and used in other STEM fields, then outlines a project to explore the feasibility of concept inventories in the computing field. We use the domain of discrete mathematics to illustrate a suggested plan of action.

Context as Support for Learning Computer Organization

The ubiquity of personal computational devices in the lives of todays students presents a meaningful context for courses in computer organization beyond the general-purpose or imaginary processors routinely used. This article presents results of a comparative study examining student performance in a conventional organization course and in one that has been contextualized using a personal gaming platform as the pedagogical architecture. We find minimal differences in student learning but significant motivation and engagement gains for those in the contextualized course.

Empirical validation and application of the computing attitudes survey

Student attitudes play an important role in shaping learning experiences. However, few validated instruments exist for measuring student attitude development in a discipline-specific way. In this paper, we present the design, development, and validation of the computing attitudes survey (CAS). The CAS is an extension of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey and measures novice to expert attitude shifts about the nature of knowledge and problem solving in computer science. Factor analysis with a large, multi-institutional data-set identified and confirmed five subscales on the CAS related to different facets of attitudes measured on the survey. We then used the CAS in a pre–post format to demonstrate its usefulness in studying attitude shifts during CS1 courses and its responsiveness to varying instructional conditions. The most recent version of the CAS is provided in its entirety along with a discussion of the conditions under which its validity has been demonstrated.