NDLI: Commonsense computing: what students know before we teach (episode 1: sorting)

Please wait, while we are loading the content...

Commonsense computing: what students know before we teach (episode 1: sorting)

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Lewandowski, Gary Simon, Beth McCartney, Robert Chen, Tzu-Yi Sanders, Kate
Abstract	We examine students' commonsense understanding of computer science concepts before they receive any formal instruction in the field. Specifically, we asked students on the first day of a CS1 class to describe in English how they would arrange a set of numbers in ascending, sorted order. We repeated the experiment with students in an introductory economics course, and again with a sub-population of the CS1 students after ten weeks of Java instruction.We found that a majority of beginning computing students could describe a coherent algorithm to correctly sort a list of numbers, while less than a third of general college students could do so. Many students gave versions of selection or insertion sort, but the most common algorithm treated numbers as strings and manipulated them digit by digit. Students who used iteration strongly preferred post-test loops. Finally, some aspects of student performance became worse after ten weeks of CS1 instruction.
Starting Page	29
Ending Page	40
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISBN	1595934944
DOI	10.1145/1151588.1151594
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2006-09-09
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Cs1 Naïve Beginner Preconceptions Resources Constructivism Sorting
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in