Date of Award:

8-2024

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Computer Science

Committee Chair(s)

John Edwards

Committee

John Edwards

Committee

Seth Poulsen

Committee

Vicki Allan

Abstract

Improving the teaching of computer science is a challenging task. Educators and computing education researchers devote large amounts of time, energy, and resources towards doing so effectively. One of the ways this is done is through research-informed design, deployment, and analysis of targeted interventions to the classroom. This thesis will detail research conducted at Utah State University targeting classroom interventions: centered around their design, deployment, and analysis.

One of these interventions aims to tackle student procrastination through the offering of “grace points”–forgiving a small amount of mistakes on a student’s assignment–for analyzing a homework assignment early. Through studying this intervention, we found evidence supporting 1) the intervention caused students to start on their assignments an average of two days earlier over a twelve day assignment period and 2) that starting earlier correlated with a nearly 8-percentage point improvement on assignment scores.

The next section of this thesis details research that can support future intervention design. It is a commonly held belief that students coding a little bit and testing their work frequently–a process called incremental development–is a good practice. However, there was a lack of research on this topic. Utilizing a tool to analyze student development behaviors, we see that this practice of incremental development correlates with more efficient work on programming assignments. In our study, CS1 students were able to complete homework assignments in half the time and write half as much code, while still achieving the same scores on homework assignments. This research supports educators and researchers in their work towards designing classroom improvements and interventions which may help student complete assignments more efficiently.

Lastly, this thesis analyzes and details the impacts of a novel tool which helps students learn the command shell. The command shell is a tool many early computer science students struggle to learn. In the USU CS1440 course, we have introduced a new tool–the Shell Tutor–which aims to tutor students through their learning of the command shell. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of this tool and finds that students have overwhelmingly positive opinions about this tool. We also identify ways which students believe this tool may be better integrated into the classroom in the future.

All together, this thesis demonstrates the successful deployment of interventions in the computing education classroom. It also details research and the creation of tools that enable educators and researchers to continue work towards improving the computer science classroom.

Checksum

4d90076a4c7a505b33ab804fbfa1bfc1

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .