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The gap between knowledge and ability

Published: 15 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We present the results of an investigation on how well students are able to understand object-oriented programming (OOP) when learning with only very minimal guidance. We analyzed the source code that the students of a preparatory course produced during the course as well as concept maps that they were asked to draw before and after the course. Our findings show, that there are observable differences between what students know about some concepts and what they're able to do with it. Generally speaking, it seems that several OOP related concepts can be applied successfully without fully understanding the underlying concepts, while others are hard to understand and apply without a significant amount of prior knowledge. This gives rise to the suspicion that it might be possible to apply a concept without having understood it, at least with respect to some algorithmic concepts of CS.

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  • (2022)Ranking of problems and solutions in the teaching and learning of object-oriented programmingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-022-10929-527:5(7205-7239)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
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cover image ACM Other conferences
Koli Calling '12: Proceedings of the 12th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
November 2012
187 pages
ISBN:9781450317955
DOI:10.1145/2401796
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Univ. Eastern Finland: University of Eastern Finland
  • Tampere University of Technology
  • Univ. Turku: University of Turku
  • Aalto University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 November 2012

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. cluster analysis
  3. code analysis
  4. computer science education
  5. concept maps
  6. empirical study
  7. object-orientation
  8. self learning

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  • Research-article

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Koli Calling '12
Sponsor:
  • Univ. Eastern Finland
  • Univ. Turku

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Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 182 submissions, 44%

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Cited By

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  • (2022)PSTProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531903(2601-2606)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
  • (2022)HELP-DKT: an interpretable cognitive model of how students learn programming based on deep knowledge tracingScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-022-07956-012:1Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Ranking of problems and solutions in the teaching and learning of object-oriented programmingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-022-10929-527:5(7205-7239)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
  • (2021)An Event Listener or an Event Handler?Proceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3488042.3488051(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
  • (2018)Developing Assessments to Determine Mastery of Programming FundamentalsProceedings of the 2017 ITiCSE Conference on Working Group Reports10.1145/3174781.3174784(47-69)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2018
  • (2017)Teaching Conceptual Modeling in Online Courses: Coping with the Need for Individual Feedback to Modeling Exercises2017 IEEE 30th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T)10.1109/CSEET.2017.30(134-143)Online publication date: Nov-2017
  • (2015)Evaluation of Source Code with Item Response TheoryProceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/2729094.2742619(51-56)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2015
  • (2015)Towards practical programming exercises and automated assessment in Massive Open Online Courses2015 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE)10.1109/TALE.2015.7386010(23-30)Online publication date: Dec-2015
  • (2015)Handling Heterogeneity in Programming Courses for FreshmenProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering10.1109/LaTiCE.2015.18(197-203)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2015
  • (2013)Concept specification mapsProceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/2462476.2462503(291-296)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013

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