Michael McCracken
Vicki Almstrum
Mark Guzdial
Abstract
In computer science, an expected outcome of a student's education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial assessment of whether students can program. The underlying goal of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Science community on how to develop these types of assessments. Several universities participated in our trial assessment and the disappointing results suggest that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation criteria developed for this study. From this trial assessment we developed a framework of expectations for first-year courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments.
- ACM & IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula 2001 (2001). Computing Curricula 2001, Ironman Draft. Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Available: http://www.acm.org/sigcse/cc2001 {2001, 5/16/01}.Google Scholar
- Beck, K. (2000). Xtreme Programming Explained: Embrace the Change. The XP Series, Addison-Wesley, 2000, Boston. Google ScholarDigital Library
- BlueJ (2001). BlueJ, the Interactive Java Environment. Available: http://www.bluej.org. {24 July 2001}.Google Scholar
- Hambleton, R. K. (1996). Advances in Assessment Models, Methods, and Practices. In D. C. Berliner and R. C. Calfee (Eds.) Handbook of Educational Psychology. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.Google Scholar
- Linn, R. L., Baker. E. L., and Dunbar, S. B. (1991). Complex, performance-based assessment: Expectations and validation criteria. Educational Researcher, 20(8), pp. 15-21.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mayer, R. E. (1981). A psychology of how novices learn computer programming. Computing Surveys, 1, pp. 121-141. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pea, R. (1986). Language independent conceptual bugs in novice programming. Educational Computing Research, 2(1), pp. 25-36.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Soloway, E., Ehrlich, K., Bonar, J., & Greenspan, J. (1982). What do novices know about programming? In A. Badre and B. Shneiderman (Eds) Directions in Human-Computer Interactions, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 27-54.Google Scholar
- Spohrer, J., & Soloway, E. (1986). Novice mistakes: Are the folk wisdoms correct? Communications of the ACM, 29(7), pp. 624-632. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wiedenbeck, S., Ramalingam, V., Sarasamma, S. and Corritore, C. L. (1999). A comparison of the comprehension of object-oriented and procedural programs by novice programmers. Interacting With Computers. 11(3), March, pp. 255-282.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wilson, B. C., & Shrock, S. (2001). Contributing to success in an introductory computer science course: A study of twelve factors. In I. Russell (Ed.), The Proceedings of the Thirty-second SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. In SIGCSE Bulletin inroads. 33(1). pp. 184-188 Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students
Recommendations
A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students
ITiCSE-WGR '01: Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science educationIn computer science, an expected outcome of a student's education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore ...
Post-graduate assessment of CS students: experience and position paper
This paper describes first-hand experience with post-graduate skill assessment of newly hired CS students at a small software development company. The assessment included technical and cognitive skills. The paper focuses on the cognitive skills (mainly ...
A first-year experience report on a model for statewide deployment of CS principles courses (abstract only)
SIGCSE '14: Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science educationThis poster describes our first-year experience in developing and evaluating a CS Principles professional development model for training a cohort of teachers across an entire state geography. The scalable deployment and sustainable persistence of the ...
Comments