Impact of alternative introductory courses on programming concept understanding

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Impact of alternative introductory courses on programming concept understanding

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International Computing Education Research Workshop archive
Proceedings of the first international workshop on Computing education research table of contents

Seattle, WA, USA

Pages: 25 - 35

Year of Publication: 2005

ISBN:1-59593-043-4

Authors

Allison Elliott Tew	Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
W. Michael McCracken	Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Mark Guzdial	Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 7, Downloads (12 Months): 62, Citation Count: 5

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abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

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ABSTRACT

Computer science has long debated what to teach in the introductory course of the discipline, and leaders in our field have argued that the introductory course approach is critical to student development. We investigated the impact of alternative approaches to introductory computing by considering the questions of what students bring to their second class in computing and how the outcomes differ depending on the students' alternative first course. Our study showed significant differences in understanding of introductory concepts, such as iteration, conditionals, and arrays, at the beginning of the second course. However, by the end of the second course their understanding had converged.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 5

	Raymond Lister , Anders Berglund , Tony Clear , Joe Bergin , Kathy Garvin-Doxas , Brian Hanks , Lew Hitchner , Andrew Luxton-Reilly , Kate Sanders , Carsten Schulte , Jacqueline L. Whalley, Research perspectives on the objects-early debate, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.38 n.4, December 2006
	S. Simon , Angela Carbone , Michael de Raadt , Raymond Lister , Margaret Hamilton , Judy Sheard, Classifying computing education papers: process and results, Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research, p.161-172, September 06-07, 2008, Sydney, Australia
	Paul Carter, An experiment with online instruction and active learning in an introductory computing course for engineers: JiTT meets CS1, Proceedings of the 14th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, May 01-02, 2009, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
	Judy Sheard , S. Simon , Margaret Hamilton , Jan Lönnberg, Analysis of research into the teaching and learning of programming, Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop, August 10-11, 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA
	Albrecht Ehlert , Carsten Schulte, Empirical comparison of objects-first and objects-later, Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop, August 10-11, 2009, Berkeley, CA, USA