Evaluating Student Understanding of Core Concepts in Computer Architecture (original) (raw)
Many studies have demonstrated that students tend to learn less than instructors expect in CS1. In light of these studies, a natural question is: to what extent do these results hold for subsequent, upper-division computer science courses? In this paper we describe our work in creating high-level con- cept questions for an upper-division computer architecture course. The questions were designed and agreed upon by subject-matter and teaching experts to measure desired min- imum proficiency of students post-course. These questions were administered to four separate computer architecture courses at two different institutions: a large public univer- sity and a small liberal arts college. Our results show that students in these courses were indeed not learning as much as the instructors expected, performing poorly overall: the per-question average was only 56%, with many questions showing no statistically significant improvement from pre- course to post-course. While these results follow the trend from CS1 courses, they are still somewhat surprising given that the courses studied were taught using research-based pedagogy that is known to be effective across the CS cur- riculum. We discuss implications of our findings and offer possible future directions of this work.
Related papers
A Survey of Assignments in Undergraduate Computer Architecture Courses
International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)
Computer architecture is an essential topic in undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curricula. Teaching computer architecture courses to CS students can be challenging, as the concepts are on a high abstraction level and not easy to grasp for students. Learning of computer architecture abstracts is strongly reinforced by hands-on assignment experience. This paper presents results from a survey of assignments from 40 undergraduate computer architecture courses, which are offered in 40 CS departments. These surveyed courses are selected from universities listed among the 120 top North America universities by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2015. The information used for this survey is based solely on material publicly accessible on the websites of courses.
How Students "Measure Up": Creation of an Assessment Instrument for Introductory Computer Science
Many recent innovations in the computer science curriculum have focused on the first-year computer science courses, and much work has been done to help determine what predicts success in the first year. However, many of these investigations lack an appropriately validated assessment instrument to confirm their findings. There are several assessment instruments available to computer science faculty, but each of them is flawed, therefore making them inappropriate for the task of assessment of the first-year computer science courses. I propose to create an assessment instrument that can be administered to students during their first year of study of computer science. This instrument will be constructed using the guidelines given in Computing Curricula 2001 for programming-first introductory courses. This instrument will be assessed for its reliability and validity and administered to students in their first year of study in computer science. The creation of this instrument will enable ...
Evolution of an introductory computer science course: the long haul
University requirements for the material covered in introductory computer science courses have evolved over the years, and those courses must therefore evolve as well. In this paper, we discuss the 7-year evolution of such a course at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1995, the main thrust of the course was to develop students' programming skills to support later programming activities, even for those students not majoring in computer science. Although some general survey topics were covered, programming skill development was the main goal of the course. Since that time, the course has evolved significantly into a course that covers general computer science and Information Technology (IT) topics in greater depth and breadth, with a continuing but greatly reduced programming component. During that 7-year period, we changed programming languages for the course, significantly changed the way in which we evaluated programming ability, incorporated graphics into the course, conducted an...
Workshop on Computer Architecture Education
Citeseer
Workshop on Computer Architecture Education Sunday, June 5, 2005 Program Committee Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State U. Kenny Ricks, Univ. of Alabama Jim Conrad, UNC–Charlotte Additional Reviewers Jeff Jackson, Univ. of Alabama William Stapleton, Univ. of Alabama ...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.