First: Introduction and background
First: Introduction and background
Concept mapping for Introductory ProgrammingRobyn A. McNamara, Monash University, November 2002 Supervisor: Dr Linda McIver AbstractHow do we know what students get out of an introductory computer programming course? Computer programming skills are notoriously difficult to assess fairly and economically. This thesis explains some of the problems inherent in teaching and assessing in the discipline, and presents a method --- competency mapping --- which extracts a better and more detailed picture of what students actually learn, without requiring them to sit extra assessment activities. Competency mapping is applied to the set of marks from an introductory course in computer programming, and a mathematical model for interpreting assessment is introduced to explain the resulting maps.It was hoped that competency mapping would shed some light on the way novice computer programmers mentally structure their knowledge about the discipline, but the experiment was only a partial success owing to problems with the design of the original assessment. Some insights were, however, gained into the way students learn computer programming. Guidelines for designing assessment to work better with competency mapping are also provided, as well as a design for a dedicated competency mapping tool.
DownloadsPrintable versions of this thesis are available in PDF (1,016,866 bytes), gzipped PDF (686,354 bytes), PostScript (2,567,654 bytes) or gzipped PostScript (507,188 bytes) formats. You can also download the LaTeX source (85,842 bytes) and bibliography (7,462 bytes).About these pagesThese pages were written as part of the requirements for CSE417 Communication and Research Skills. They are hand-converted from the original LaTeX source to my thesis.They have been tested under Mozilla v5.0, Netscape v6, Netscape v4.8, Opera 6.03, Internet Explorer v6 and Lynx v2.8.4 but ought to work on any browser that can deal with tables. They were all developed using vim, except for the five pages that make up Appendix III which were autogenerated by OpenOffice.org v1.01. All graphics in the body of the text were converted to PNG format using the Gimp. If this thesis is useful at all, most of the credit must go to Dr Linda McIver, my supervisor, for allowing me to pursue my own original ideas. The design for these pages was also inspired by one of hers, although it has been substantially modified in this implementation. Thanks also go to Thorne Lawler, for debugging my HTML and beta-testing, and especially to Stephen McNamara, for moral support, proofreading, child-minding, remaining married to me despite only seeing my back hunched over a computer for two months straight, and coffee above and beyond the call of duty. | |
First: Introduction and
background
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