Judithe Sheard

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teaching and learning with MOOCs: computing academics' perspectives and engagement

During the past two years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have created wide interest in the academic world raising both enthusiasm for new opportunities for universities and many concerns for the future of university education. The discussion has mainly appeared in non-scientific forums, such as magazine articles, columns and blogs, making it difficult to judge wider opinions within academia. To collect more rigorous data we surveyed teachers, researchers, and academic managers on their opinions and experiences of MOOCs. In this paper, we present our analysis of responses from the computer science academic community (n=137). Their feelings about MOOCs are highly mixed. Content analysis of open-ended questions revealed that the most often mentioned positive aspects included affordances of MOOCs, freedom of time and location for studying, and the possibility to experience teaching from top-level international teachers/experts. The most common negative aspects included concerns about pedagogical designs of MOOCs, assessment practices, and lack of interaction with the teacher. About half the respondents claimed they had not changed their teaching as a result of MOOCs, a small number used MOOCs as learning resources and very few were engaging with MOOCs in any significant way.

Towards a gender inclusive information and communications technology curriculum: a perspective from graduates in the workforce

An online survey was conducted of recent information and communications technology (ICT) graduates from 21 Australian universities. A range of abilities including personal/interpersonal, cognitive, business and technical were examined in relation to importance in the workplace and university preparation of those abilities. In addition, a set of six open-ended text-response questions concerned with the curriculum and other workplace preparation were asked. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed a range of responses that were significantly different according to gender. Amongst the significant findings are that females are more concerned than males with interpersonal communication, the development of people-skills and the people side of ICT. Implications for the ICT curriculum are that it should have more than a narrow male-centred technological focus and include the involvement of people and the effects of ICT on society in general. This broad inclusive pedagogical approach would satisfy the needs expressed by all respondents and contribute to increasing the enrolments of both female and male students in ICT.

Student perceptions of the acceptability of various code-writing practices

This paper reports on research that used focus groups and a national online survey of computing students at Australian universities to investigate perceptions of acceptable academic practices in writing program code for assessment. The results indicate that computing students lack a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes acceptable academic practice with regard to writing program code. They are not clear on the need to reference code taken from other sources, or on how to do so. Where code from other sources is used, or inappropriate collaboration takes place between students, there appears to be a feeling that any academic misconduct is diminished or even nullified if the students subsequently work with the code to make it their own. These findings suggest a need for the development of standards that elucidate acceptable practices for computing, combined with ongoing education of computing students.

Social Skills among Students while Playing Computer Games in Class: A Case Study in Malaysia

Computer games are very popular among Malaysians especially youngster as they are easily accessed anywhere with the widespread availability of computer in Malaysia. We believe that computer games could and should be exploited as another medium for teaching and learning in Malaysian schools. An investigation about the possibilities of optimizing computer games as another pedagogy instrument especially focusing at students’ social skills development had been conducted in Malaysia. 341 public school students and 24 teachers across Selangor Darul Ehsan were involved and 9 computer games were tested. The results showed that with each game has different gameplay, challenges and genre, students’ social skills development could be slightly improved. The important issue is not the object or technology used in teaching and learning, but how it is being applied and diffused. Teachers have to take a positive and active role in ensuring that these computer games are incorporated effectively especially for students’ social skills development.

The Monash Museum of Computing History: part 1

The Monash Museum of Computing History, Monash University preserves the artifacts and the experiences of fifty years of computing education and research at one of Australias top ten universities. In this first part of a two part paper, we describe the purpose, the development and the planned future for the museum. In Part Two, we will describe the collection and current display.