Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Knobelsdorf, Maria

Titel

A typology of CS students' preconditions for learning

Ist Teil von

• Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computing Education Research, 2008, p.62-71

Ort / Verlag

New York, NY, USA: ACM

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ACM Digital Library Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Problems that first year students encounter when majoring in Computer Science (CS) are complex and interrelated. We assume that CS majors drop the subject because, among other non-educational reasons, the teaching process and learning environment do not fit their preconditions for learning. Before meaningful educational interventions can be developed to address this issue, a profound understanding of students' learning backgrounds is needed. For this reason, we developed a biographical research approach, which allows us to analyze students' individual computing experiences retrospectively. Students' computing experiences are individual and thus vary. However, students still share some common experiences, beliefs, and perceptions and a certain coherence or relationship should exist between them. Therefore, the objective of our research is to reconstruct typical patterns among the single characteristics of students' preconditions. For this purpose an empirically-based typology is planned. This paper presents our research design, providing a detailed description of how to develop an empirically-based typology.