From jem@cs.umu.se Thu Feb 3 05:11:18 2005 Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 14:11:07 +0100 From: "Jan Erik [iso-8859-1] Moström" To: Josh Tenenberg Subject: Re: [Scaffolding] Scaffolding/Bootstrapping cojoined meeting at SIGCSE (fwd) [ The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "us-ascii" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] On 2005-01-31 03:15, Josh Tenenberg wrote: Hi > First, a reminder to get me your research designs for sigcse as soon > as possible, by next Monday at the latest. We currently have one > submitted. Here is a suggestion: At ITiCSE 2004 we did a study about how students can read and understand code. One thing that surprised me was that the students from two universities (one being mine) didn¹t annotate their solutions to the same degree as most other students. Despite this these students didn¹t do much worse or better than any other university, although the results from the study suggests that annotations improve the results. What makes this even more interesting is that these two universities are "close" to each other geographically (Denmark & Sweden) and that Denmark/Sweden have some "common history" in computer science (if I¹ve understood things correctly). So the question I wonder about is: Was this just a random event or is there a pattern here? And if this wasn't a random event: what could be the cause for this difference? Tradition? Teaching methods? ... Why doing this? Well, at least I have always imagined that CS students and the teaching of CS was pretty much the same all over the world. OK, some differences in focus of different departments, some differences in student abilities, etc but if this is not the case and there is some other major difference what would it mean? Is it of any significance? etc. So I would like to suggest a study similar to the one we did at ITiCSE 2004 so see if this was just a random event or not. I think a studly like this should be combined with another study, perhaps for studying the students ability to understand OO etc. jem -- Jan Erik Moström jem@cs.umu.se www.cs.umu.se/~jem Datavetenskap Umeå Universitet