Computers have become a part of every area of human life, and are often used in the field of education. Becoming self-confident with regard to computer use can therefore make individuals' lives particularly the lives of university students substantially easier. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the computer self-efficacy belief (CSEB) level…

Uncertainty about future career prospects has increased enormously for students enrolled in higher education Information Technology (IT) programs. However, many computer science programmes pay little attention to career counselling. This article reports the results of a pilot study intended to develop group counselling for IT students to promote…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

Language modeling is one of many problems in language processing that have to grapple with naturally high ambient dimensions. Even in large datasets, the number of unseen sequences is overwhelmingly larger than the number of observed ones, posing clear challenges for estimation. Although existing methods for building smooth language models tend to…

We present our case study of an interdisciplinary team project for students taking either a psychology or computer science (CS) course. The project required psychology and CS students to combine their knowledge and skills to create an online cognitive task. Each interdisciplinary project team included two psychology students who conducted library…

Partnerships between higher education and business have long been an important part of the academic landscape, but often they are based on shorter-term transactional objectives rather than on longer-term strategic goals. BHEF's National Higher Education and Workforce Initiative brings together business and academia at the institutional,…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

This paper presents a framework for facilitating communication among STEM project teams that are geographically dispersed in synchronous or asynchronous online courses. The framework has been developed to: (a) improve how engineering and technology students and faculty work with collocated and geographically-dispersed teams; and (b) to connect the…

Differentiated instruction in the form of tiered take-home lab exercises was implemented for students of an undergraduate-level programming course. This paper attempts to uncover the perceptions and usage patterns of students toward these new lab exercises using a comprehensive survey. Findings reveal that these tiered exercises are generally very…

While there have been very limited studies of the educational computing literature to analyze the research trends since the early emergence of educational computing technologies, the authors argue that it is important for both researchers and educators to understand the major, historical educational computing trends in order to inform…

The Advanced Placement® (AP®) Program offers high school students the opportunity to take rigorous coursework in high school and receive college credit for AP Exam scores that meet or exceed the requirements of their attending institution. Students receiving AP credit are typically exempted from an introductory level course or series of courses…

The importance of high-tech careers has risen as the international competitiveness of US students on tests of science and math has declined. The problem is compounded by a persistent inequity in STEM participation and achievement in the US across gender and racial and ethnic groups. Bridgewater State University's Student Retention Enhancement…

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is an effective approach for promoting active learning. When inquiry-based learning is incorporated into instruction, teachers provide guiding questions for students to actively explore the required knowledge in order to solve the problems. Although the World Wide Web (WWW) is a rich knowledge resource for students to…

This paper presents findings from empirical study on assessing third year students' academic performance and development of generic skills through participatory teaching. Generic skills inventory and academic performance were utilized as measuring instruments where as activities of participatory learning used as an independent variable. The main…

With few exceptions, students interact with technology in one way or another every day. And yet, in most U.S. schools, the term "computer science" (CS) refers only to generic skills classes, such as keyboarding and computer applications. Even most Web programming classes usually teach students only how to use conventional graphical user…