C. S. Prasad

Not seeing the forest for the trees: novice programmers and the SOLO taxonomy

This paper reports on the authors use of the SOLO taxonomy to describe differences in the way students and educators solve small code reading exercises. SOLO is a general educational taxonomy, and has not previously been applied to the study of how novice programmers manifest their understanding of code. Data was collected in the form of written and think-aloud responses from students (novices) and educators (experts), using exam questions. During analysis, the responses were mapped to the different levels of the SOLO taxonomy. From think-aloud responses, the authors found that educators tended to manifest a SOLO relational response on small reading problems, whereas students tended to manifest a multistructural response. These results are consistent with the literature on the psychology of programming, but the work in this paper extends on these findings by analyzing the design of exam questions.

Occurrence of Pesticide Residues in market and Farmgate samples of Okra crop, Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) in Meerut region

A multi pesticide residues analysis was carried out for farmgate samples (20) of okra fruits from four market places of Meerut region namely Daurala, Lawer, Kesarganj and Partapur markets. 40, 45, 30, 35, 50 and 25% samples were > MRL and 30, 40, 35, 45, 35 and 45% sam-ples were recorded MRL and 25, 30, 40, 45, 20 and 25% samples had residues MRL and 50, 45, 45, 45, 40 and 30% and 40, 40, 45, 45, 35 and 40% samples, respectively contained residues < MRL values of monocrotophos (0.20), chlorpyriphos (0.20), di-methoate (2.00), cypermethrin (0.20), endosulfan (2.00) and imidacloprid (0.05ppm), respectively. So the okra fruits samples with residues above MRL are not safe for human consumption.