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This paper examines results from a multiple-choice test given to novice programmers at twelve institutions, with specific focus on annotations made by students on their tests. We found that the question type affected both student performance and student annotations. Classifying student answers by question type, annotation type (tracing, elimination, other, or none), and institution, we found that tracing was most effective for one type of question and elimination for the other, but overall, any annotation was better than none.

This paper examines software designs produced by students nearing completion of their Computer Science degrees. The results of this multi-national, multi-institutional experiment present some interesting implications for educators.

Students often “get stuck” when trying to learn new computing concepts and skills. In this paper, we present and categorize strategies that successful students found helpful in getting unstuck. We found that the students reported using a broad range of strategies, and that these strategies fall into a number of recognizably different categories.

This paper examines transformational learning experiences of computing students as a way to better understand threshold concepts in computing. From empirical evidence we found that students often describe transformative experiences as learning situations in which they were led to use various kinds of abstraction, for example modularity, data abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism, reuse, design patterns, and complexity. Some students describe an abstract concept as coming first, and then needing to be made concrete though application; others describe transformations in which they learn the advantages of these abstract concepts from their experience of not using them. Abstraction is certainly of central importance in computer science. It appears, however, from our students’ descriptions of transformative experiences, that abstraction per se is not a threshold, but that particular concepts in which abstraction is paramount exhibit the characteristics of threshold concepts.

In this paper, we present the results of an experiment in which we sought to elicit students’ understanding of object-oriented (OO) concepts using concept maps. Our analysis confirmed earlier research indicating that students do not have a firm grasp on the distinction between “class” and “instance.” Unlike earlier research, we found that our students generally connect classes with both data and behavior. Students rarely included any mention of the hardware/software context of programs, their users, or their real-world domains. Students do mention inheritance, but not encapsulation or abstraction. And the picture they draw of OO is a static one: we found nothing that could be construed as referring to interaction among ob jects in a program. We then discuss the implications for teaching introductory OO programming.

We examine the changes in the ways computing students view their field as they learn, as reported by the students themselves in short written biographies. In many ways, these changes result in students thinking and acting more like computer scientists and identifying more with the computing community. Most of the changes are associated with programming and software engineering, rather than theoretical computer science, however.

At least since the early~80s there have been researchers and teachers claiming that understanding concurrency is a necessity for our students. Many authors also write that concurrency is very difficult for students to learn. However, other researchers claim that concurrency is something natural to most humans and the problems are caused by the way we teach the subject and the languages/tools we use.

This paper looks at a number of articles that discuss concurrency and student learning. Many of them discuss various tools, sometime without giving any evidence that they solve a problem that students actually have and/or that the tools improve the situation. Others discuss course designs, where the designs are based on assumptions about how concurrency should be taught. There are also studies that try to understand what causes the problems that students experience and how to improve the situation.

Unfortunately, in reading these articles we have to come to the conclusion that the situation today is much the same as in the early-80s: We do not know how to teach concurrency.

In a survey of existing research on the teaching of concurrency, many teachers/researchers write that students have problems in learning concurrency. Several suggestions for how to improve teaching concurrency by using specific tools, languages, or curricula are given. Much of this advice appears to have no empirical background but is based on ``common knowledge'' or teacher's/researcher's personal experience.

This paper reports on a study where students were interviewed about their experience of learning concurrency. During the interviews the students reported that concurrency was both fun and interesting, and that the increased complexity only acted as a challenge, making the learning more interesting.