Author Archives: Duncan Hull

Join us to discuss spatial skills in engineering on Monday 9th May at 2pm BST

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CC BY-SA licensed image of a Rubik’s cube via by Booyabazooka Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/He9

Spatial skills can be beneficial in engineering and computing, but how are they connected? Why are spatial abilities beneficial in engineering? Join us to discuss this via a paper on spatial skills training by Jack Parkinson and friends at the University of Glasgow. Here is the abstract:

We have been training spatial skills for Computing Science students over several years with positive results, both in terms of the students’ spatial skills and their CS outcomes. The delivery and structure of the training has been modified over time and carried out at several institutions, resulting in variations across each intervention. This article describes six distinct case studies of training deliveries, highlighting the main challenges faced and some important takeaways. Our goal is to provide useful guidance based on our varied experience for any practitioner considering the adoption of spatial skills training for their students.

see [1]

All welcome. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us. Thanks to Steven Bradley for suggesting the paper

References

  1. Jack Parkinson, Ryan Bockmon, Quintin Cutts, Michael Liut, Andrew Petersen and Sheryl Sorby (2021) Practice report: six studies of spatial skills training in introductory computer science, ACM Inroads Volume 12, issue 4, pp 18–29 DOI: 10.1145/3494574

Join us to discuss the feeling of learning ❤️ (vs. actual learning) on Monday 4th April at 2pm BST

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Learning can be an emotional process and we often don’t realise when we are actually learning. When you’re listening to an expert explain something well, it’s easy to mistake the speaker’s smooth delivery for your own understanding. You might feel like you’re learning, but actual learning is often hard work and feels uncomfortable. Join us to discuss actual learning vs. feeling of learning via a paper by Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin at Harvard University here is the abstract:

We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors). Both groups received identical class content and handouts, students were randomly assigned, and the instructor made no effort to persuade students of the benefit of either method. Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students’ perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods. For instance, a superstar lecturer could create such a positive feeling of learning that students would choose those lectures over active learning. Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning. That disconnect may have a detrimental effect on students’ motivation, engagement, and ability to self-regulate their own learning. Although students can, on their own, discover the increased value of being actively engaged during a semester-long course, their learning may be impaired during the initial part of the course. We discuss strategies that instructors can use, early in the semester, to improve students’ response to being actively engaged in the classroom.

From [1] and [2]

Thanks to Uli Sattler and Andrea Schalk for highlighting the paper. All welcome. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

References

  1. Logan S. McCarty; Kelly Miller; Kristina Callaghan; Greg Kestin (2019) “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: 201821936. DOI:10.1073/PNAS.1821936116 PMC: 6765278 PMID: 31484770
  2. Jill Barshay (2022) College students often don’t know when they’re learning: Harvard experiment reveals the psychological grip of lectures, The Hechinger Report

Join us to discuss conversational programming on Monday 7th March at 2pm GMT

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Somewhere between the traditional division of non-programmers and programmers, there is a third category of conversational programmers. These are people who can (or want) to learn programming so that they can speak in the “programmer’s language” and work better with software engineers. Join us to discuss conversational programming via paper by Katie Cunningham et al. [1] This won a best paper award at SIGCSE 2022: 🏆

As the number of conversational programmers grows, computing educators are increasingly tasked with a paradox: to teach programming to people who want to communicate effectively about the internals of software, but not write code themselves. Designing instruction for conversational programmers is particularly challenging because their learning goals are not well understood, and few strategies exist for teaching to their needs. To address these gaps, we analyse the research on programming learning goals of conversational programmers from survey and interview studies of this population. We identify a major theme from these learners’ goals: they often involve making connections between code’s real-world purpose and various internal elements of software. To better understand the knowledge and skills conversational programmers require, we apply the Structure Behaviour Function framework to compare their learning goals to those of aspiring professional developers. Finally, we argue that instructional strategies for conversational programmers require a focus on high-level program behaviour that is not typically supported in introductory programming courses.

see [1] below


All welcome. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

References

  1. Kathryn Cunningham, Yike Qiao, Alex Feng and Eleanor O’Rourke (2022) Bringing “High-level” Down to Earth: Gaining Clarity in Conversational Programmer Learning Goals in SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Pages 551–557 DOI:10.1145/3478431.3499370
Video summary of the paper by Katie Cunningham

Join us to discuss widening participation for Women in Computing on Monday 7th February at 2pm GMT

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Public domain image of Margaret Hamilton standing next to a print out of software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Guidance Computer in 1969 via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/4mXY

Computing is too important to be left to men, but where have all the women gone? While women continue to play a key role in computing they are currently under-represented in Computer Science. How can we change this and what evidence is there for practices that get more women into computing? Join us to discuss the subject via a paper by Briana Morrison et al [1] on Monday 7th February at 2pm GMT. Here is the abstract of the paper:

Computing has, for many years, been one of the least demographically diverse STEM fields, particularly in terms of women’s participation. The last decade has seen a proliferation of research exploring new teaching techniques and their effect on the retention of students who have historically been excluded from computing. This research suggests interventions and practices that can affect the inclusiveness of the computer science classroom and potentially improve learning outcomes for all students. But research needs to be translated into practice, and practices need to be taken up in real classrooms. The current paper reports on the results of a focused systematic “state-of-the-art” review of recent empirical studies of teaching practices that have some explicit test of the impact on women in computing. Using the NCWIT Engagement Practices Framework as a means of organisation, we summarise this research, outline the practices that have the most empirical support, and suggest where additional research is needed.

All welcome, whatever your gender identity, gender expression or biological sex. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Briana B. Morrison, Beth A. Quinn, Steven Bradley, Kevin Buffardi, Brian Harrington, Helen H. Hu, Maria Kallia, Fiona McNeill, Oluwakemi Ola, Miranda Parker, Jennifer Rosato and Jane Waite (2021) Evidence for Teaching Practices that Broaden Participation for Women in Computing in Proceedings of the 2021 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education DOI:10.1145/3502870.3506568

Join us to discuss sense of belonging in Computer Science on Mon 6th Dec at 2pm GMT

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Students sense of belonging has been shown to be associated with many attributes such as motivation and persistence. But what makes people feel like they belong in Computer Science? Join us on Monday 6th December at 2pm GMT to discuss belonging via a paper by Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker. [1] This won a best paper award at SIGCSE 2021.

[There will be no SIGCSE journal club in November, however, we’ll be back in December as usual.]

Sense of belonging, or belongingness, describes how accepted one feels in their academic community and is an important factor in creating inclusive learning environments. Belongingness is influenced by many factors including: students’ backgrounds and experiences; other people; environments (physical and virtual); academic discipline; external factors such as local, regional, and global issues; and time. 2020 has been dominated by several major events including the COVID-19 pandemic which dramatically impacted education. The Black Lives Matter movement has further raised global awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion not just in society, but in educational contexts. Climate change concerns, and politically charged news are also increasingly affecting our students.

We have been monitoring our undergraduate computing students’ sense of belonging for over three years, providing us with a unique opportunity to gauge recent changes during the pandemic. Our results surprised us. We found statistically significant reductions in the belongingness of students identifying as men as well as those not identifying as being part of a minority. However, investigating intersectionality of self-identified gender and minority status revealed more complicated and nuanced trends, illustrating important shifts in the belongingness of our students that we are only beginning to understand.

There’s a video summary of the paper here:

Video summary of the paper by Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker

As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker (2021) Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Computing Students’ Sense of Belonging. SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2021 Pages 612–618 DOI:10.1145/3408877.3432407

Join us to re-examine inequalities in Computer Science participation on Monday 4th October at 2pm BST

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It’s no secret that both Computer Science and engineering have inequalities in their participation. Join us to re-examine and discuss these inequalities via a paper by Maria Kallia and Quintin Cutts [1] on Monday 4th October at 2pm BST. This won a best paper award at ICER 2021. From the abstract:

Concerns about participation in computer science at all levels of education continue to rise, despite the substantial efforts of research, policy, and world-wide education initiatives. In this paper, which is guided by a systematic literature review, we investigate the issue of inequalities in participation by bringing a theoretical lens from the sociology of education, and particularly, Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction. By paying particular attention to Bourdieu’s theorising of capital, habitus, and field, we first establish an alignment between Bourdieu’s theory and what is known about inequalities in computer science (CS) participation; we demonstrate how the factors affecting participation constitute capital forms that individuals possess to leverage within the computer science field, while students’ views and dispositions towards computer science and scientists are rooted in their habitus which influences their successful assimilation in computer science fields. Subsequently, by projecting the issue of inequalities in CS participation to Bourdieu’s sociological theorisations, we explain that because most interventions do not consider the issue holistically and not in formal education settings, the reported benefits do not continue in the long-term which reproduces the problem. Most interventions have indeed contributed significantly to the issue, but they have either focused on developing some aspects of computer science capital or on designing activities that, although inclusive in terms of their content and context, attempt to re-construct students’ habitus to “fit” in the already “pathologized” computer science fields. Therefore, we argue that to contribute significantly to the equity and participation issue in computer science, research and interventions should focus on restructuring the computer science field and the rules of participation, as well as on building holistically students’ computer science capital and habitus within computer science fields.

A presentation video by Maria of the paper from ICER 2021


All welcome. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom. Thanks to Steven Bradley for suggesting this months paper.

References

  1. Maria Kallia and Quintin Cutts (2021) Re-Examining Inequalities in Computer Science Participation from a Bourdieusian Sociological Perspective. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER) 2021 Pages 379–392, 10.1145/3446871.3469763

Join us to discuss why computing students should contribute to open source software projects on Mon 6th September at 2pm BST

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Why should students bother with open source software? Join us to discuss why via a viewpoint piece published by Diomidis Spinellis of Athens University and Delft University of Technology published in the July issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. [1] Here’s the introduction :

Learning to program is—for many practical, historical, as well as some vacuous reasons—a rite of passage in probably all computer science, informatics, software engineering, and computer engineering courses. For many decades, this skill would reliably set computing graduates apart from their peers in other disciplines. In this Viewpoint, I argue that in the 21st century programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Accordingly, I propose that computing students should be encouraged to contribute code to open source software projects through their curricular activities. I have been practicing and honing this approach for more than 15 years in a software engineering course where open source contributions are an assessed compulsory requirement. Based on this experience, I explain why the ability to make such contributions is the modern generalization of coding skills acquisition, outline what students can learn from such activities, describe how an open source contribution exercise is embedded in the course, and conclude with practices that have underpinned the assignment’s success

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details

References

  1. Spinellis, Diomidis (2021). “Why computing students should contribute to open source software projects”. Communications of the ACM. 64 (7): 36–38. DOI:10.1145/3437254

Join us to discuss when study turns digital on Monday 2nd August at 2pm BST

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Public domain image of Coronavirus by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at CDC.gov on Wikimedia commons w.wiki/ycs


The pandemic has accelerated changes to the way we teach and learn. Join us to discuss the Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure: a paper by Vegard Gjerde, Robert Gray, Bodil Holst and Stein Dankert Kolstø on the effects of the pandemic on Physics Education at a Norwegian University. [1]

In March 2020, universities in Norway and many other countries shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The students lost access to classrooms, libraries, study halls, and laboratories. Studying turned digital. Because it is unclear when this pandemic will cease to affect students and because we cannot know whether or when a new pandemic occurs, we need to find ways to improve digital study-life for students. An important step in this direction is to understand the students’ experiences and perspectives regarding how the digitalization affected their study-life both in structured learning arenas and their self-study. Therefore, we interviewed 12 students in an introductory mechanics course at a Norwegian university in June of 2020. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four broad categories in the students’ different experiences and reflections, namely that digitalization: (a) provides benefits, e.g. the flexibility inherent in online video lectures; (b) incurs learning costs, e.g. students reducing their study effort; (c) incurs social costs, e.g. missing being around other students; and (d) increases the need for structure, e.g. wanting to be arranged in digital groups to solve mandatory tasks. We also found that the 2019 students on average scored significantly better on the final exam than the 2020 students, d = 0.31, but we discuss why this result should be interpreted with caution. We provide suggestions for how to adapt courses to make students’ digital studying more socially stimulating and effective. Furthermore, this study is a contribution to the historical documentation of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Sarah Clinch for suggesting the paper.

References

  1. Gjerde, Vegard; Gray, Robert; Holst, Bodil; Kolstø, Stein Dankert (2021). “The Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure”. Physics Education. 56 (5): 055004. doi:10.1088/1361-6552/ac031e

Join us to discuss the tyranny of content on Monday 5th July at 2pm BST

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CC-BY-SA image of Bill Gates by Kuhlmann MSC via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/3W7k

If content is king, then his rule is tyrannical. Bill Gates once remarked that “Content is King” but In the kingdom of education, how much do educators oppressively inflict content on their learners? What can be done to reduce the tyranny of content? We’ll be discussing this via a paper by Christina I. Petersen et al, here’s the abstract:

Instructors have inherited a model for conscientious instruction that suggests they must cover all the material outlined in their syllabus, and yet this model frequently diverts time away from allowing students to engage meaningfully with the content during class. We outline the historical forces that may have conditioned this teacher-centered model as well as the disciplinary pressures that inadvertently reward it. As a way to guide course revision and move to a learner-centered teaching approach, we propose three evidence-based strategies that instructors can adopt: 1) identify the core concepts and competencies for your course; 2) create an organizing framework for the core concepts and competencies; and 3) teach students how to learn in your discipline. We further outline examples of actions that instructors can incorporate to implement each of these strategies. We propose that moving from a content-coverage approach to these learner-centered strategies will help students better learn and retain information and apply it to new situations.

All welcome. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details.

References

  1. Petersen, Christina I.; Baepler, Paul; Beitz, Al; Ching, Paul; Gorman, Kristen S.; Neudauer, Cheryl L.; Rozaitis, William; Walker, J. D.; Wingert, Deb; Reiness, C. Gary (2020). The Tyranny of Content: “Content Coverage” as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It. CBE—Life Sciences Education. 19 (2): ar17. doi:10.1187/cbe.19-04-0079

Join us to discuss cognitive load on Monday 7th June at 2pm

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Cognitive Load Theory provides a basis for understanding the learning process. It has been widely used to improve the teaching and learning of many subjects including Computer Science. But how can it help us build better collaborative learning experiences? Join us to discuss via a paper by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller, Femke Kirschner & Jimmy Zambrano R. [1] From the abstract:

Cognitive load theory has traditionally been associated with individual learning. Based on evolutionary educational psychology and our knowledge of human cognition, particularly the relations between working memory and long-term memory, the theory has been used to generate a variety of instructional effects. Though these instructional effects also influence the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative learning, be it computer supported or face-to-face, they are often not considered either when designing collaborative learning situations/environments or researching collaborative learning. One reason for this omission is that cognitive load theory has only sporadically concerned itself with certain particulars of collaborative learning such as the concept of a collective working memory when collaborating along with issues associated with transactive activities and their concomitant costs which are inherent to collaboration. We illustrate how and why cognitive load theory, by adding these concepts, can throw light on collaborative learning and generate principles specific to the design and study of collaborative learning.

Thanks to Nicola Looker for suggesting this months paper. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details.

References

  1. Kirschner, Paul A.; Sweller, John; Kirschner, Femke; Zambrano R., Jimmy (2018). “From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory”. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. 13 (2): 213–233. DOI:10.1007/s11412-018-9277-y