Yifat Ben-David Kolikant

Digital natives, better learners? Students' beliefs about how the Internet influenced their ability to learn

In the literature students are sometimes assumed to feel empowered with respect to learning because of their familiarity with and access to ICT. However, after interviewing 25 students from post-elementary schools, it was found that the majority of the students, although they use the Internet and other ICT for school purposes, believed that their generation is not as good at learning as the pre-ICT generation. Several students explained the situation in terms of the schools failure to build on their abilities. Nonetheless, the majority believed that the Internet over-simplifies schoolwork (perceived primarily as the traditional processing of textual sources), which in turn diminishes learning abilities. These results carry important implications regarding school, given that low self-efficacy might make students less likely to apply themselves to learning.

“Clickers” as Catalysts for Transformation of Teachers

Personal response systems (PRS)—also called student response systems (SRS), or more commonly, “clickers”—can be a catalyst for transformation of a learning environment from one of silence to one rich in dialogue and interaction. But how is this transformation achieved? In this paper, we present three case studies of instructors who use PRS in undergraduate science and math classes at a research-intensive institution in the Midwest, USA. All three instructors reported having to make significant adjustments to their teaching over time in order to transform their respective learning environments and fully realize the benefits of PRS. These adjustments included (1) modifying activities to overcome the tension between the students’ desire for anonymity and the need for interactivity to enhance learning, and (2) revising PRS questions in response to student behavior. We contend that transformation of the environment with PRS is neither instantaneous nor straightforward. As such, faculty who introduce PRS to their classrooms may benefit from substantial pedagogical and technological support. Finally, we note that the ongoing feedback about student learning in the classroom that PRS provides may act as a powerful catalyst to transform faculty, moving them from teacher-centered conceptions and approaches to teaching to student-centered conceptions and approaches.

Gardeners and Cinema Tickets: High School Students' Preconceptions of Concurrency

We are developing a course in concurrency for high school students. The course is being developed in phases of refinement on the basis of feedback received from teachers and students. We have found persistent difficulties that students have in understanding fundamental concepts, which has led us to investigate their preconceptions of concurrency. This paper describes the results of this investigation. The work is anchored in constructivism, which stresses the importance of prior knowledge upon which new knowledge is built. The students were asked to solve concurrency problems, both prior to the course and after learning just the basics of the subject. Analysis of solutions reveals that students: (a) find that solving a problem on the order of actions is more natural than the critical section problem, (b) are divided in their preference for centralized and decentralized solutions, (c) employ inappropriate heuristics, (d) invent computational models as they work, (e) attribute parallelism where it does not exist, (f) attribute intelligence to systems. Based on these findings, we were able to modify the course to address these problems of prior knowledge.

Difficulties in Learning Inheritance and Polymorphism

This article reports on difficulties related to the concepts of inheritance and polymorphism, expressed by a group of 22 in-service CS teachers with an experience with the procedural paradigm, as they coped with a course on OOP. Our findings are based on the analysis of tests, questionnaires that the teachers completed in the course, as well as on observations made during the course. The article suggests that the difficulties are mostly caused by the learners’ ignorance about a programming model for inheritance and polymorphism. Such a model is presented in the appendix. The article offers a classification of the difficulties into the following four clusters: (1) alternative (partial) models, (2) analogies to the use of inheritance and conversion in day-to-day life or in imperative programming, (3) lack of understanding of hierarchies and their role in inheritance, and (4) difficulties due to approaches to teaching, and their impact on the students understanding, as well as, with difficulties that arose in previous stages of learning OOP and have yet not been resolved.

The asymmetrical influence of identity: a triadic interaction among Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and historical texts

This study engaged Israeli‐Jewish and Israeli‐Arab students in a joint investigation of their common past by means of secondary historical sources. The hypothesis was that a triadic interaction among agents of groups with opposing views and historical texts can foster historical thinking. It was expected that while ethnic identity would drive both sides, the mutual criticism in a setting that encourages analytic discussion would bring about learning. Following an analysis of essays written before and during the inter‐ethnic collaboration as well as transcripts of students’ meetings, it was found that students’ work was influenced by majority–minority power relations. In a joint writing effort, the Jews dominated actions that did not directly concern the conflict, and the Arabs dominated those that did. Nonetheless, the students’ epistemology evolved to recognize the interpretive nature of history and the bias inherent in humans, as reflected in the analysis of the essays.

Collaboration amidst disagreement and moral judgment: The dynamics of Jewish and Arab students’ collaborative inquiry of their joint past

We present an instructional model involving a computer-supported collaborative learning environment, in which students from two conflicting groups collaboratively investigate an event relevant to their past using historical texts. We traced one enactment of the model by a group comprised of two Israeli Jewish and two Israeli Arab students. Our data sources included the texts participants wrote—pre-, post- and during the activity, jointly and individually—the transcripts of the e-discussion and reflections written after the activity. The setting enabled us to further our understanding of what collaboration means when students’ voices do not converge. We examined whether the activity was productive in terms of learning, and the dynamics of collaboration within the milieu, especially the intersubjective meaning making. The e-discussion that was co-constructed by participants was a chain of disagreements. However, participants’ reflections reveal that the group structure and the e-communication method were perceived as affording sensitive collaboration. Furthermore, a comparison between the individual texts, pre- and post- the group discussion, revealed that the activity was productive, since students moved from a one-sided presentation of the event to a more multi-sided representation. Based on the analysis of the e-discussion, we conclude that the setting provided students with opportunities to examine their voices in light of alternatives. We propose the term fission to articulate certain moments of intersubjectivity, where a crack is formed in one’s voice as the Other’s voice impacts it, and one’s voice become more polyphonic.

Computer science education as a cultural encounter: a socio-cultural framework for articulating teaching difficulties

This study demonstrates the power of the cultural encounter metaphor in explaining learning and teaching difficulties, using as an example computer science education (CSE). CSE is envisioned as an encounter between veterans of two computer-oriented cultures, that of the teachers and that of the students. Forty questionnaires administered to CS teachers, as well as in-depth interviews with four leading CS teachers, revealed those teachers perceived their students as having a different perspective on the domain, on what constitutes a beneficial approach to problem-solving and on the nature of satisfactory solutions. In fact, the teachers portrayed their teaching as a continual battle in which their success is limited. Yet, their instruction was characterized as a composite of enforcement and compromise, with few and isolated attempts at building on students’ cultural capital. The cultural encounter metaphor, while still viewing students as novices to the professional CS culture represented by their teachers, emphasizes that good teaching requires building upon students’ cultural capital to create zones of fertile cultural encounter.

Community-oriented pedagogy for in-service CS teacher training

In this paper, we examine CS teachers from the aspect of their membership within a community of practice. We show that there is much interaction among the teachers; however, this interaction is merely for exchanging classroom materials and rarely involves a thorough analysis or the design of meaningful pedagogy. Consequently we present, with examples, a community-oriented pedagogical approach for re-designing the interaction to include thorough discussions utilizing a birds-eye view of the discipline of CS as well as theories of learning in the context of in-class practice. We show that teachers who participated in a course, which was designed according to community-oriented pedagogy, recognized the power of belonging to a community and consequently changed their self-perception of being merely knowledge consumers to being collaborative knowledge producers as well.

Computer programs, dialogicality, and intentionality

Computer programs are addressed to two different audiences: to the computer, which interprets the program according to the formal semantics of the programming language in which it is written, and to human readers, who try to discern how the program will operate in a real-world context. In this paper, we use Bakhtins notion of dialogicality, along with recent research in psycholinguistics and evolutionary psychology, as a theoretical basis for reflecting on the way in which computer programs embed cooperative communicative norms between programmers and program readers, and how these can be and sometimes are exploited in the program text. In doing so, this provides an important set of theoretical lenses for undertaking and interpreting empirical research in computer science education.

High-school students’ perceptions of the effects of non-academic usage of ICT on their academic achievements

Abstract We investigated high-school students’ perceptions of the relationship between non-academic information and communications technology (NA-ICT) use and academic achievements. A sample of 533 Israeli students responded to surveys on ICT use habits, achievements, and the relationship between the two. A negative correlation between reported NA-ICT use time and reported scores was found. The idea of the negative effect of NA-ICT use on achievements was accepted by the majority of students, regardless of their academic achievements. However, when asked about the effect that reducing NA-ICT use time might have on their own grades, the majority of students found on the middle levels of the school performance scale appeared to believe that limiting NA-ICT usage will help them improve their grades. In contrast, students found on both ends of the scale (high-achieving and low-achieving alike) did not necessarily see a decrease in NA-ICT usage as beneficial. We discuss a possible explanation relying on Covington’s (1992) Self Esteem Theory and the entailed practical implications of our study.