Education Commons^™

Exploring Practical Measures As An Approach For Measuring Elementary Students’ Attitudes Towards Computer Science, Umar Shehzad, Mimi M. Recker, Jody E. Clarke-Midura

Publications

This paper presents a novel approach for predicting the outcomes of elementary students’ participation in computer science (CS) instruction by using exit tickets, a type of practical measure, where students provide rapid feedback on their instructional experiences. Such feedback can help teachers to inform ongoing teaching and instructional practices. We fit a Structural Equation Model to examine whether students' perceptions of enjoyment, ease, and connections between mathematics and CS in an integrated lesson predicted their affective outcomes in self-efficacy, interest, and CS identity, collected in a pre- post- survey. We found that practical measures can validly measure student experiences.

Rethinking Integrated Computer Science Instruction: A Cross-Context And Expansive Approach In Elementary Classrooms, Umar Shehzad, Jody E. Clarke-Midura, Kimberly Beck, Jessica F. Shumway, Mimi M. Recker

Publications

This study examines how a rural-serving school district aimed to provide elementary level computer science (CS) by offering instruction during students’ computer lab, a class taught by paraprofessional educators with limited background in computing. As part of a research practice partnership, cross-context mathematics and CS lessons were co-designed to expansively frame and highlight connections across – as opposed to integration within – the two subjects. Findings indicate that the paraprofessionals teaching the lessons generally reported positive experiences and understanding of content; however, those less comfortable with the content reported lower student interest. Further, most students who engaged with the lessons …

Geometry And Coding: Introducing An Interactive And Integrated Mathematics-Computer Science Unit, Kimberly Beck, Jessica F. Shumway

Publications

As part of a collaborative project between Utah State University, the Cache County School District, and Stanford, instructional units were designed for fifth-grade students. These units integrated math concepts of geometrical shapes and computer science concepts of sequences, conditionals, and loops. One component of the unit was implemented in math classrooms by math teachers, and the other component was implemented in computer labs. This presentation will focus on the math unit as presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM-V).

Co-Designing Elementary-Level Computer Science And Mathematics Lessons: An Expansive Framing Approach, Umar Shehzad, Jody Clarke-Midura, Kimberly Beck, Jessica Shumway, Mimi Recker

Publications

This study examines how a rural-serving school district aimed to provide elementary-level computer science (CS) by offering instruction during students’ computer lab time. As part of a research-practice partnership, cross-context mathematics and CS lessons were co-designed to expansively frame and highlight connections across – as opposed to integration within – the two subjects. Findings indicated that most students who engaged with the lessons across the lab and classroom contexts reported finding the lessons interesting, seeing connections to their mathematics classes, and understanding the programming. In contrast, a three-level logistic regression model showed that students who only learned about mathematics connections …

Applying Expansive Framing To An Integrated Mathematics-Computer Science Unit, Kimberly Evagelatos Beck, Jessica F. Shumway

Publications

In this research report for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2022 Research Conference, we discuss the theory of Expansive Framing and its application to an interdisciplinary mathematics-computer science curricular unit.

"Design For Co-Design" In A Computer Science Curriculum Research-Practice Partnership, Victor R. Lee, Jody Clarke-Midura, Jessica F. Shumway, Mimi Recker

Publications

This paper reports on a study of the dynamics of a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) oriented around design, specifically the co-design model. The RPP is focused on supporting elementary school computer science (CS) instruction by involving paraprofessional educators and teachers in curricular co-design. A problem of practice addressed is that few elementary educators have backgrounds in teaching CS and have limited available instructional time and budget for CS. The co-design strategy entailed highlighting CS concepts in the mathematics curriculum during classroom instruction and designing computer lab lessons that explored related ideas through programming. Analyses focused on tensions within RPP interaction dynamics …

Power Of Near-Peers: Conceptualizing And Testing A Near-Peer Mentoring Model In Raising Youths' Self-Efficacy In Computer Programming, Chongning Sun

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Self-efficacy is seen as a barrier for youth, females in particular, to enter computer science (CS). In this study, I presented a near-peer mentoring model that focused on changing the mentee’s self-efficacy in CS. The present study had three objectives: (a) to design a near-peer mentoring model (i.e., a conceptual model) around the sources of information that influence self-efficacy, (b) to develop a mentor training model based on the conceptual model, and (c) to test the effectiveness of the training model in increasing mentees’ self-efficacy in the context of a summer App programming camp. The present study adopted a mixed-methods …

Using Data To Improve Services For Infants With Hearing Loss: Linking Newborn Hearing Screening Records With Early Intervention Records, Maria Gonzalez, Lori Iarossi, Yan Wu, Ying Huang, Kirsten Siegenthaler

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

The purpose of this study was to match records of infants with permanent hearing loss from the New York Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Information System (NYEHDI-IS) to records of infants with permanent hearing loss receiving early intervention services from the New York State Early Intervention Program (NYSEIP) to identify areas in the state where hearing screening, diagnostic evaluations and referrals to the NYSEIP were not being made or documented in a timely manner. Data from 2014-2016 NYEHDI-IS and NYEIS information systems were matched using The Link King. There were 274 infants documented in NYEIS Information System as receiving early …

Understanding Teacher Users Of A Digital Library Service: A Clustering Approach, Beijie Xu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research examined teachers' online behaviors while using a digital library service—the Instructional Architect (IA)—through three consecutive studies. In the first two studies, a statistical model called latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to cluster different groups of IA teachers according to their diverse online behaviors. The third study further examined relationships between teachers' demographic characteristics and their usage patterns. Several user clusters emerged from the LCA results of Study I. These clusters were named isolated islanders, lukewarm teachers, goal-oriented brokers, window shoppers, key brokers, beneficiaries, classroom practitioners, and dedicated sticky users. …

Collaborative Strategic Board Games As A Site For Distributed Computational Thinking, Matthew Berland, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal – the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper introduces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative …

Where In The World? Demographic Patterns In Access Data, Mimi Recker, Beijie Xu, Sherry Hsi, Christine Garrard

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Standard webmetrics tools record the IP address of users’ computers, thereby providing fodder for analyses of their geographical location, and for understanding the impact of e-learning and teaching. Here we describe how two web-based educational systems were engineered to collect geo-referenced data. This is followed by a description of joining these data with demographic and educational datasets for the United States, and mapping different datasets using geographic information system (GIS) techniques to visually display their relationships. Results from statistical analyses of these relationships that highlight areas of significance are given.

Expanding The Horizons Of Educational Pair Programming: A Methodological Review Of Pair Programming In Computer Science Education Research, Keith B. Rimington

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Educators and researchers continue to explore the benefits, real or imagined, of implementing pair programming as part of the computer science pedagogy. Current reviews of computer science educational research practices do not focus on educational pair programming. This thesis presents a review of the research methods used in recent educational pair programming research. The primary purpose of this review is to inform the ongoing dialogue about and to provide evidence-based recommendations for improving educational pair programming research.

Replicating the design of a previous computer science education methodological review, this study inspected a sample of 108 articles from a population of …

Educational Data Mining Approaches For Digital Libraries, Mimi Recker, Sherry Hsi, Beijie Xu, Rob Rothfarb

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This collaborative research project between the Exploratorium and Utah State's Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences investigates online evaluation approaches and the application of educational data mining to educational digital libraries and services. Much work over the past decades has focused on developing algorithms and methods for discovering patterns in large datasets, known as Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD). Webmetrics, the application of KDD to web usage mining, is growing rapidly in areas such as e-commerce. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is just beginning to emerge as a tool to analyze the massive, longitudinal user data that are captured in …