From Intuition to Evidence: A Data-Driven Approach to Transforming CS Education

Educators in many disciplines are too often forced to rely on intuition about how students learn and the effectiveness of teaching to guide changes and improvements to their curricula. In computer science, systems that perform automated collection and assessment of programming assignments are seeing increased adoption, and these systems generate a great deal of meaningful intermediate data and statistics during the grading process. Continuous collection of these data and long-term retention of collected data present educators with a new resource to assess both learning (how well students understand a topic or how they behave on assignments) and teaching (how effective a response, intervention, or assessment instrument was in evaluating knowledge or changing behavior), by basing their decisions on evidence rather than intuition. It is only possible to achieve these goals, however, if such data are easily accessible. I present an infrastructure that has been added to one such automated grading system, Web-CAT, in order to facilitate routine data collection and access while requiring very little added effort by instructors. Using this infrastructure, I present three case studies that serve as representative examples of educational questions that can be explored thoroughly using pre-existing data from required student work. The first case study examines student time management habits and finds that students perform better when they start earlier but that offering extra credit for finishing earlier did not encourage them to do so. The second case study evaluates a tool used to improve student understanding of manual memory management and finds that students made fewer errors when using the tool. The third case study evaluates the reference tests used to grade student code on a selected assignment and confirms that the tests are a suitable instrument for assessing student ability. In each case study, I use a data-driven, evidence-based approach spanning multiple semesters and students, allowing me to answer each question in greater detail than was possible using previous methods and giving me significantly increased confidence in my conclusions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Allevato, Anthony James

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Edwards, Stephen H.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Tatar, Deborah Gail
• Ramakrishnan, Naren
• Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel A.
• Evia Puerto, Carlos

• intuition
• evaluation
• assessment
• Web-CAT
• evidence
• Dereferee
• C++
• extra credit
• student performance
• procrastination
• time management
• student behavior
• data collection
• memory management
• pointers
• item response theory
• reference tests
• JUnit
• difficulty
• discriminating ability
• automated grading
• Eclipse
• BIRT
• reporting
• Computer science education

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-07212012-094523

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/28352