Some empirical results for neo-Piagetian reasoning in novice programmers and the relationship to code explanation questions

Recent research on novice programmers has suggested that they pass through neo-Piagetian stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational stages, before eventually reaching programming competence at the formal operational stage. This paper presents empirical results in support of this neo-Piagetian perspective. The major novel contributions of this paper are empirical results for some exam questions aimed at testing novices for the concrete operational abilities to reason with quantities that are conserved, processes that are reversible, and properties that hold under transitive inference. While the questions we used had been proposed earlier by Lister, he did not present any data for how students performed on these questions. Our empirical results demonstrate that many students struggle to answer these problems, despite the apparent simplicity of these problems. We then compare student performance on these questions with their performance on six explain in plain English questions.

Large eddy simulation of smoke flow in a real road tunnel fire using FDS

Numerical study is carried out using large eddy simulation to study the heat and toxic gases released from fires in real road tunnels. Due to disasters about tunnel fires in previous decade, it attracts increasing attention of researchers to create safe and reliable ventilation designs. In this research, a real tunnel with 10 MW fire (which approximately equals to the heat output speed of a burning bus) at the middle of tunnel is simulated using FDS (Fire Dynamic Simulator) for different ventilation velocities. Carbone monoxide concentration and temperature vertical profiles are shown for various locations to explore the flow field. It is found that, with the increase of the longitudinal ventilation velocity, the vertical profile gradients of CO concentration and smoke temperature were shown to be both reduced. However, a relatively large longitudinal ventilation velocity leads to a high similarity between the vertical profile of CO volume concentration and that of temperature rise.

How difficult are exams? A framework for assessing the complexity of introductory programming exams

Student performance on examinations is influenced by the level of difficulty of the questions. It seems reasonable to propose therefore that assessment of the difficulty of exam questions could be used to gauge the level of skills and knowledge expected at the end of a course. This paper reports the results of a study investigating the difficulty of exam questions using a subjective assessment of difficulty and a purpose-built exam question complexity classification scheme. The scheme, devised for exams in introductory programming courses, assesses the complexity of each question using six measures: external domain references, explicitness, linguistic complexity, conceptual complexity, length of code involved in the question and/or answer, and intellectual complexity (Bloom level). We apply the scheme to 20 introductory programming exam papers from five countries, and find substantial variation across the exams for all measures. Most exams include a mix of questions of low, medium, and high difficulty, although seven of the 20 have no questions of high difficulty. All of the complexity measures correlate with assessment of difficulty, indicating that the difficulty of an exam question relates to each of these more specific measures. We discuss the implications of these findings for the development of measures to assess learning standards in programming courses.

A qualitative think aloud study of the early Neo-Piagetian stages of reasoning in novice programmers

Recent research indicates that some of the difficulties faced by novice programmers are manifested very early in their learning. In this paper, we present data from think aloud studies that demonstrate the nature of those difficulties. In the think alouds, novices were required to complete short programming tasks which involved either hand executing ("tracing") a short piece of code, or writing a single sentence describing the purpose of the code. We interpret our think aloud data within a neo-Piagetian framework, demonstrating that some novices reason at the sensorimotor and preoperational stages, not at the higher concrete operational stage at which most instruction is implicitly targeted.

A conceptual model for reflecting on expected learning vs. demonstrated student performance

Educators are faced with many challenging questions in designing an effective curriculum. What prerequisite knowledge do students have before commencing a new subject? At what level of mastery? What is the spread of capabilities between bare-passing students vs. the top performing group? How does the intended learning specification compare to student performance at the end of a subject? In this paper we present a conceptual model that helps in answering some of these questions. It has the following main capabilities: capturing the learning specification in terms of syllabus topics and outcomes; capturing mastery levels to model progression; capturing the minimal vs. aspirational learning design; capturing confidence and reliability metrics for each of these mappings; and finally, comparing and reflecting on the learning specification against actual student performance. We present a web-based implementation of the model, and validate it by mapping the final exams from four programming subjects against the ACM/IEEE CS2013 topics and outcomes, using Bloom's Taxonomy as the mastery scale. We then import the itemised exam grades from 632 students across the four subjects and compare the demonstrated student performance against the expected learning for each of these. Key contributions of this work are the validated conceptual model for capturing and comparing expected learning vs. demonstrated performance, and a web-based implementation of this model, which is made freely available online as a community resource.

What vs how : comparing students' testing and coding skills

The well-known difficulties students exhibit when learning to program are often characterised as either difficulties in understanding the problem to be solved or difficulties in devising and coding a computational solution. It would therefore be helpful to understand which of these gives students the greatest trouble. Unit testing is a mainstay of large-scale software development and maintenance. A unit test suite serves not only for acceptance testing, but is also a form of requirements specification, as exemplified by agile programming methodologies in which the tests are developed before the corresponding program code. In order to better understand students’ conceptual difficulties with programming, we conducted a series of experiments in which students were required to write both unit tests and program code for non-trivial problems. Their code and tests were then assessed separately for correctness and ‘coverage’, respectively. The results allowed us to directly compare students’ abilities to characterise a computational problem, as a unit test suite, and develop a corresponding solution, as executable code. Since understanding a problem is a pre-requisite to solving it, we expected students’ unit testing skills to be a strong predictor of their ability to successfully implement the corresponding program. Instead, however, we found that students’testing abilities lag well behind their coding skills.

Changing relationships : engaging students and staff in the design studio

QUT Learning and Teaching Unit Seminar Making a Real Difference: Learning and Teaching Grants Showcase This event recognised and shared teaching innovations, including those from faculty learning and teaching grants. The Showcase featured four ALTC Grant project leaders (Helen Partridge, Sylvia Edwards, Robyn Nash and Mary Ryan) who had recently completed or were about to complete their grants. Each QUT faculty nominated two 2010 faculty teaching and learning grant recipients to showcase grant outcomes via a poster. Poster: Shannon Satherley & Abbe Winter Changing Relationships: Engaging Students and Staff in the Design Studio 'In the design studio learning environment, traditional student and staff expectations are of close contact teaching and learning. However, in recent years increasing class sizes have meant students experiencing reduced personal staff attention, and increasingly feeling “anonymous” and correspondingly disengaged, to the detriment of quality learning (Carbone 1998: 8; Biggs 2003). Concurrently, there has been a necessary increase in teaching by sessional (casual) teaching staff at QUT, with varied levels of experience and assurance. While teachers primarily regard engagement as “cognitive and conative,” for students it is emotional: “... an essential need to feel that they were engaged with the context of their learning and that it was meaningful in some way” (Solomonides and Martin 2008: 18). As a response to these conditions, the Changing Relationships action-research project was run within a QUT School of Design studio unit in 2009 and 2010, based on the premise that engaged teaching can encourage emotionally engaged learning. The project inverted the structure of the traditional QUT studio unit, empowering both students and sessional staff with a sense of increased autonomy: literally changing the relationships within the studio learning environment.'

Combination therapy with gefitinib and rofecoxib in patients with platinum-pretreated relapsed non-small-cell lung cancer

Purpose: In non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) play major roles in tumorigenesis. This phase I/II study evaluated combined therapy with the EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) gefitinib and the COX-2 inhibitor rofecoxib in platinum-pretreated, relapsed, metastatic NSCLC (n = 45). Patients and Methods: Gefitinib 250 mg/d was combined with rofecoxib (dose escalated from 12.5 to 25 to 50 mg/d through three cohorts, each n = 6). Because the rofecoxib maximum-tolerated dose was not reached, the 50 mg/d cohort was expanded for efficacy evaluation (n = 33). Results: Among the 42 assessable patients, there was one complete response (CR) and two partial responses (PRs) and 12 patients with stable disease (SD); disease control rate was 35.7% (95% CI, 21.6% to 52.0%). Median time to tumor progression was 55 days (95% CI, 47 to 70 days), and median survival was 144 days (95% CI, 103 to 190 days). In a pilot study, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) proteomics analysis of baseline serum samples could distinguish patients with an objective response from those with SD or progressive disease (PD), and those with disease control (CR, PR, and SD) from those with PD. The regimen was generally well tolerated, with predictable toxicities including skin rash and diarrhea. Conclusion: Gefitinib combined with rofecoxib provided disease control equivalent to that expected with single-agent gefitinib and was generally well tolerated. Baseline serum proteomics may help identify those patients most likely to benefit from EGFR TKIs. © 2007 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Should Cyberbullying Be Criminalized?

Society’s attitudes towards all forms of bullying have changed in the last thirty years from considering it to be a normal part of childhood, a rite of passage and character building to regarding bullying as a behaviour to be prevented and condemned (Rigby, 2008; Žižek, 2008). This has been brought about by the research into the consequences of bullying during this time, revealing bullying to be detrimental not only to students who have been victimized but also to students who perpetrate the bullying and the bystanders who witness such behaviour. These consequences include increased levels of depression, anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms (Fekkes, Pijpers, Frediks, Vogels, & Verloove-Vanhorrick, 2006; Kim, Leventhal, Koh, Hubbard, & Boyce, 2006; Reijntjs, Kamphuis, Prinzie, & Telch, 2010) for those students who have been victimized. Different detrimental associations have been found for girls and boys who had been bullied in one longitudinal study (Carbone-Lopez, Esbensen, & Bick 2010); girls who had been indirectly bullied increased their drug use whereas boys did not, and while victimized girls showed lower self-esteem, this did not occur for boys.

European Union and the developing nations' external debt : EU-15's debt policy, 1960–2008

This Master's Thesis defines the debt policy of the current European Union Member States towards the developing nations. Since no official policy for debt exists in the EU, it is defined to include debt practices (loans and debt relief in development cooperation) and debt within the EU development policy framework. This study (1) describes how the issue of external debt appears in the development policy framework, (2) compares EU Member States' given loans and debt relief to grants for the developing nations (1960s to the 2000s), and (3) measures the current orientation in ODA of each EU Member State between grant aid and loan aid using the Grant-Loan Index (GLI). Theoretical aspects include reasons for selecting between loans (Bouchet 1987) and grants (Odedokun 2004, O'Brien and Williams 2007), policy context of the EU (Van Reisen 2007) and the meaning of external debt in the set-up between the North and the South. In terms of history, the events and impact of the colonial period (where loans have originated) are overviewed and compared in light of today's policies. Development assistance statistics are derived from the OECD DAC statistics portal and EU development policy framework documents from the EU portal. Methodologically, the structure of this study is from policy analysis (Barrien 1999, Hill 2008, Berndtson 2008), but it has been modified to fit the needs of studying a non-official policy. EU Member States are divided into three groups by Carbone (2007a), the Big-3, Northern and Southern donors, based on common development assistance characteristics. The Grant-Loan Index is used to compare Carbone's model, which measures quality of aid, to the GLI measuring the structure of aid. Results indicate that EU- 15 countries (active in debt practices) differ in terms of timing, stability and equality of debt practices in the long-term (1960s to the 2000s). In terms of current practices, (2000-2008), it is noted that there lies a disparity between the actual practices and the way in which external debt is represented in the development policy framework, although debt practices form a relevant portion of total ODA practices for many EU-15 Member States, the issue itself plays a minor role in development policy documents. Carbone’s group division applies well to the Grant – Loan Index’s results, indicating that countries with similar development policy behaviour have similarities in debt policy behaviour, with one exception: Greece. On the basis of this study, it is concluded that EU development policy framework content in terms of external debt and debt practices are not congruent. The understanding of this disparity between the policy outline and differences in long-term practices is relevant in both, reaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and in the actual process of developing development aid.

Spectroscopic evidence for the removal of mobile holes on Fe doping in YBa2Cu3-xFexO7-δ

X-ray absorption spectra at the oxygen K edge using the total yield technique are reported for YBa2Cu3O6.9 and YBa2Cu2.7Fe0.3O6.9. A comparison of the two spectra reveals that the mobile holes in YBa2Cu3O7-δ are removed and localized on Fe doping. Fe thus enters the lattice primarily in the formally trivalent oxidation state.

Analysis of the Ce 3d-4d4d Auger spectrum with the use of synchrotron radiation

We report 3d-4d4d Auger spectra of Ce metal with the use of synchrotron radiation to excite the initial core hole. By sweeping the excitation energy through the 3d-->4f threshold, it has been possible to excite different initial states selectively, enabling us to analyze the complex spectrum in terms of different contributions arising from various deca channels.

Analysis of the Gd 4d-XY Auger spectrum using synchrotron radiation

We report the 4d-XY (X, Y = 5p, 4f, and the conduction band) Auger spectra of clean Gd using a monochromatic photon source with energies above and below the 3d threshold. The spectra with higher hv show the existence of intense spectator-hole Auger transitions. Comparison of these spectra with those obtained with a primary electron source allows detailed interpretation of the various features and explains the unusual spin polarization of the electron-induced spectrum reported earlier.