Ryan McFall

Electronic textbooks that transform how textbooks are used

Purpose – This papers goals are to motivate the design of an electronic textbook that seeks to transform how textbooks are used inside and outside the classroom. In particular, it seeks to show that merely creating an electronic form of an existing paper textbook is not a sufficiently motivating condition for instructors and students to move from paper to electronic textbooks, and doing so misses much of the opportunities presented by electronic media to enhance learning from textbooks.Design/methodology/approach – An electronic textbook application running on Microsofts TabletPC operating system was implemented and used as the primary text in three offerings of an Introductory Computer Science course, with one section used as a control group. Student learning was assessed via course examinations and overall grades, and student perceptions and use of the textbook were assessed via surveys.Findings – No significant differences in student learning or textbook usage were observed between students using the...

Animation of Java linked lists

Linked lists are an important component of the computer science curriculum. JVALL is a software package that provides an animation of linked list operations that is fully compatible with the Java LinkedList class. The animations are driven by a client program that can be either an applet or standalone application. It provides an effective way for students to learn, experiment with, and debug linked list based classes.

Increasing engagement and enrollment in breadth-first introductory courses using authentic computing tasks

The breadth-first approach to teaching introductory computer science is one way of dispelling the common misperception that programming is the sole task of the computer scientist. The breadth-first approach is particularly useful in courses for non-majors. Hands-on activities that make up laboratory assignments for these courses tend to focus on learning to program or simulations of program execution. These activities unfortunately fail to build on the foundations laid by a breadth-first approach, and serve to perpetuate the computer science = programming misperception. We have developed a set of laboratory activities which are based on what we call authentic computing tasks: everyday tasks that students want to know how to accomplish. Example tasks include image editing, operating system installation and configuration, and building home computer networks. Explicit connections are made between these authentic computing tasks and the computer science concepts being covered in the lecture portion of the course. The course has experienced dramatic increases in enrollment, and we have evidence that students see the connections, rather than coming to believe that performing computing tasks well is the essence of computer science.

An assessment database for supporting educational research

One of the challenges of research in science education is storing, managing and querying the large amounts of diverse student assessment data that are typically collected in many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. Furthermore, longitudinal studies across courses and ABET accreditation necessitate tracking students throughout their academic programs in which each course will have different types of data. Researchers need to manage, assign metadata to, merge, sort, and query all of these data to support instructional decisions, research and accreditation. To address these needs we have constructed a database to support both data-driven instructional decision making and research in STEM education. We have built upon existing metadata standards to define an extensible Educational Metadata Language (EdML) that enables assessments to be tagged based on taxonomies, standard psychometrics such as difficulty and discrimination, and other data to facilitate cross-study analyses. Once a collection of assessment data are available, faculty can examine their assessment data to evaluate historical trends, analyze the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques and strategies, or compare the performance of different teaching and assessment techniques within their course or across institutions.