Computer Science Education Research at Wits Vashti Galpin - - PDF document

Science Faculty Workshop 2001 Computer Science Education Research at Wits 1

✬ ✫ ✩ ✪ University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg

School of Computer Science

Computer Science Education Research at Wits

Vashti Galpin vashti@cs.wits.ac.za http://www.cs.wits.ac.za/~vashti

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Introduction and outline

• motivation – better teaching, equity issues
• national and international links including ACM-W

Ambassador, ACM/IEEE PFG I curriculum chair

• Masters Computer Science Education course
• overview of School’s research
• results of

– gender research – evaluation of Introduction to Research Methods – evaluation of first year curriculum

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Curriculum and teaching methodology

• first year curriculum, diverse backgrounds [Mueller, Rock

and Sanders 1990, 1993; Sanders and Mueller 1994, 1999, 2000]

• evaluation of first year curriculum
• evaluation of Honours Introduction to Research Meth-
• ds [Galpin, Hazelhurst, Mueller and Sanders 1999a,

1999b, 1999c]

• comparison of institutions [Daniels, Gal-Ezer, Sanders

and Teague 1996; Sanders and Hedetniemi 1998; Sanders 1997b]

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Curriculum and teaching methodology cont.

• role of programming in the curriculum [Machanick 1998a,

2000a]

• Bloom’s taxonomy and skills hierarchy [Machanick 1998c,

1998d, 2000b, 2000c]

• software engineering [Baber 1998]

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Teaching algorithms and programming

• ALEX: using pseudo code to express and execute algo-

rithms [Pyott and Sanders 1991a, 1991b, 1991c]

• AAPT: a simple program animator [Sanders and Gopal

1991a, 1991b]

• animating recursion [Wilcocks and Sanders 1994]
• teaching programming using values [Mueller 1992]
• abstraction first approach to programming [Machanick

1995, 1996, 1997, 1998b, 1999, 2001]

• empirical analysis of algorithms [Sanders 2000a, 2000b]

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Other research

• mentoring and peer-tutoring

[Sanders 1995a, 1995b, 1997a]

• general articles

[Galpin 1992a; Sanders 1992; Machanick 2000d]

• gender

[Galpin 1992b; Galpin and Sanders 1993; Sanders and Galpin 1994; Herbert and Sanders 1999; Herbert 2000]

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Gender – monitoring

• Wits [Galpin 1992b; Galpin and Sanders 1993; Herbert

and Sanders 1999; Herbert 2000] – BSc and BSc Hons, 1986 – 1998, between 24% and 31%, average 27%, no clear trends – trends, 1993 – 1998 ∗ increase in Black female and male students, actual & percentage ∗ decrease in White male students, percentage ∗ changes in class sizes

• national statistics: ACM-W Ambassador webpage

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Gender – attitudes

• research into attitudes to computer science of first year

Faculty of Science students [Sanders and Galpin 1994] – males registered for CS I, more informal and less formal exposure, more confidence – females registered for CS I, more formal exposure, less confidence – males not registered for CS I, less exposure, more negative perceptions – females not registered for CS I, more female role models, more games

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Gender – role models

• research into role models for first year Faculty of Science

students [Herbert 2000] – lack of positive role models – male dominated but women can learn – perception of good careers – confusion about what computer science is

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First year curriculum evaluation

• current research

– first year curriculum [Mueller et al. 1993] [Sanders and Mueller 1994, Sanders and Mueller 2000] ∗ build from fundamentals ∗ give overview of computer science ∗ emphasis is not programming ∗ does not favour those with computing experience – how perceptions of computers and computer science change during the first year curriculum – focus on gender and race

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Research methods course evaluation

• Honours level course to support research project
• evaluation by students of usefulness for research [Galpin,

Hazelhurst, Mueller and Sanders 1999a, 1999b, 1999c] – mostly positive – modifications to course – evaluation of modifications

• beneficial side-effect: approached by UNISA for course

material

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Conclusion

• School of Computer Science

– wide range of Computer Science Education research – ongoing research – informs teaching practices – important international and national links – Masters course – support for this research – recognition of this research

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References

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• M. Daniels, J. Gal-Ezer, I.D. Sanders, and G.J. Teague. Teaching com-

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