Angela Carbone

Student Engagement in First Year of an ICT Degree: Staff and Student Perceptions.

This article reports on a study of student engagement in the first year of their undergraduate information and communication technology (ICT) degree at an Australian university. The study was conducted at Monash University in the four undergraduate ICT degrees of the Faculty of Information Technology. The study draws on data collected from staff and students using interviews and a start of semester survey. Three aspects of engagement broadly classified as behavioural, cognitive and affective are used as a framework to analyse the data. Results show that staff perceived students as demonstrating low levels of engagement in their university study. Students presented many reasons to explain the nature and extent of their engagement. Many of their reasons relate to studying in an educational landscape of changing lifestyles and work patterns and a strong reliance on technology to support their learning. This article re-conceptualises the undergraduate student learning experience in the current tertiary climate. Implications of the perceived lack of student engagement are discussed and recommendations are made for ways to increase the level of student engagement.

Classifying computing education papers: process and results

We have applied Simons system for classifying computing education publications to all three years of papers from ICER. We describe the process of assessing the inter-rater reliability of the system and fine-tuning it along the way. Our analysis of the ICER papers confirms that ICER is a research-intensive conference. It also indicates that the research is quite narrowly focused, with the majority of the papers set in the context of programming courses. In addition we find that ICER has a high proportion of papers involving more than one institution, and high proportions of papers on the themes of ability/aptitude and theories and models of teaching and learning.

A survey of methods used to evaluate computer science teaching

A literature survey shows that the teachers own impression of the teaching and the students is the most common way of evaluating novelties in teaching. However, also low cost methods with better validity and reliability were found. These included data from several sources, or they comprised of several learning cycles in an iterative development.

Exploring programming assessment instruments: a classification scheme for examination questions

This paper describes the development of a classification scheme that can be used to investigate the characteristics of introductory programming examinations. We describe the process of developing the scheme, explain its categories, and present a taste of the results of a pilot analysis of a set of CS1 exam papers. This study is part of a project that aims to investigate the nature and composition of formal examination instruments used in the summative assessment of introductory programming students, and the pedagogical intentions of the educators who construct these instruments.

Systematic review methodology in higher education

Systematic review methodology can be distinguished from narrative reviews of the literature through its emphasis on transparent, structured and comprehensive approaches to searching the literature and its requirement for formal synthesis of research findings. There appears to be relatively little use of the systematic review methodology within the higher education sector. This paper outlines the systematic review methodology, including variations, explores debates regarding systematic reviews from the educational literature and describes particular issues for its application within higher education. We conclude that thoughtful use of the systematic review methodology may be of benefit to the sector.

Computer science and IT teachers' conceptions of successful and unsuccessful teaching: A phenomenographic study

In this paper we present the results of a phenomenographic study revealing the conceptions of successful and unsuccessful teaching among information and communication technology, information technology (IT), and computer science academics. We examine ways in which the understandings of IT teachers are similar to or differ from other teachers in domain-specific ways. Our categorizations of successful teaching (feeling successful, good delivery, developing student thinking) correspond to similar findings in the literature. However, our categorizations of unsuccessful teaching are more revealing. Undergraduate IT teachers understand unsuccessful teaching in five ways: teacher lacks skills, teacher lacks organizational support, students do not take responsibility, domain complexity, and students do not demonstrate understanding. These conceptualizations do not directly correspond to the ways in which teachers perceive successful teaching, revealing a gap between idealized notions of teaching and actual teaching in practice. Of specific interest, lack of administrative support in the form of insufficient funding, overloaded lecture hours, and inexperienced teaching assistants emerged as barriers to effective teaching. Equally important, difficulties in dealing with abstraction and complexity specific to IT disciplines have consequences for the way in which IT should be taught. These phenomenographic categories of description are intended to serve as a framework for IT teachers to engage in a process of self-reflection leading to improved teaching practices. We present ways in which the understandings of successful and unsuccessful teaching can aid in this process.

Academic integrity: differences between computing assessments and essays

There appears to be a reasonably common understanding about plagiarism and collusion in essays and other assessment items written in prose text. However, most assessment items in computing are not based in prose. There are computer programs, databases, spreadsheets, and web designs, to name but a few. It is far from clear that the same sort of consensus about plagiarism and collusion applies when dealing with such assessment items; and indeed it is not clear that computing academics have the same core beliefs about originality of authorship as apply in the world of prose. We have conducted focus groups at three Australian universities to investigate what academics and students in computing think constitute breaches of academic integrity in non-text-based assessment items; how they regard such breaches; and how academics discourage such breaches, detect them, and deal with those that are found. We find a general belief that non-text-based computing assessments differ in this regard from text-based assessments, that the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable practice are harder to define than they are for text assessments, and that there is a case for applying different standards to these two different types of assessment. We conclude by discussing what we can learn from these findings.

Assessment of programming: pedagogical foundations of exams

Previous studies of assessment of programming via written examination have focused on analysis of the examination papers and the questions they contain. This paper reports the results of a study that investigated how these final exam papers are developed, how students are prepared for these exams, and what pedagogical foundations underlie the exams. The study involved interviews of 11 programming lecturers. From our analysis of the interviews, we find that most exams are based on existing formulas that are believed to work; that the lecturers tend to trust in the validity of their exams for summative assessment; and that while there is variation in the approaches taken to writing the exams, all of the exam writers take a fairly standard approach to preparing their students to sit the exam. We found little evidence of explicit references to learning theories or models, indicating that the process is based largely on intuition and experience.

A scheme for improving ICT units with critically low student satisfaction

Unit evaluations across many Australian universities indicate that close to 10% of units in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Engineering disciplines are flagged as needing critical attention, and as such these faculties often struggle to meet university and national targets on educational performance. Further, ICT and Engineering repeatedly have the highest student dropout rates. This paper reports on the efficacy of activities undertaken to improve teaching quality and student satisfaction. Specifically, this paper outlines a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) as a process that was embedded in the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) at Monash University to build peer assistance capacity in the faculty to improve student satisfaction of units in need of critical attention.

Academic integrity perceptions regarding computing assessments and essays

Student perceptions of academic integrity have been extensively researched in relation to text-based assessments, but there is rather less research relating to non-text-based assessments such as computer programs, databases, and spreadsheets. This paper reports the findings from a survey of computing students and academics to investigate perceptions of particular academic practices with regard to both essays and computing assessments. For each practice the research sought to discover whether it was perceived to constitute plagiarism or collusion and whether it was considered to be acceptable in an academic environment. While there was general agreement between academics and students regarding some practices, both groups displayed high levels of uncertainty about other practices. There was considerable variation between their attitudes to similar practices in the text and non-text environments, and between what was seen as plagiarism/collusion and perceptions of unacceptability. That is, there were practices that were perceived to be plagiarism or collusion but were considered acceptable, and others that were considered not to be plagiarism or collusion but were nevertheless thought unacceptable. These findings suggest a need for academic integrity policies and procedures specific to computing, accompanied by discipline-specific student education.