Course descriptions prepared by the lecturers in the beginning of the academic year do not get any feed back from the students enrolled it. These syllabuses are not only used for the future semesters, but also used by the other lecturers without even making any changes. This causes a negative effect on the student education since many of the…

Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of…

Most systems development projects incorporate some sort of life cycle approach in their development. Whether the development methodology involves a traditional life cycle, prototyping, rapid application development, or some other approach, the first step usually involves a system investigation, which includes problem identification, feasibility…

This study examined undergraduate information technology (IT) students' (N = 122) level of ethical reasoning and decision making at a Midwestern university. The purpose was to determine whether IT students' level of ethical reasoning provided information about the degree of their ethical decision making. The Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2) was used…

Case method teaching is not limited to larger, complex cases. It is often useful to supplement classroom discussions with short cases, ones that have been targeted for one or two discussion points that challenge student thinking beyond the usual lecture or textbook. These shorter cases are called "minicases." The objective of a minicase is to…

Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has dipped all over the country, and among women it has almost vanished, dropping 70 percent between 2000 and 2005. Observers cite different reasons for the drop, including the dot-com bust a few years ago is one, but universities are beginning to agree on one cause that is within their…

Text analytics refers to the process of analyzing unstructured data from documented sources, including open-ended surveys, blogs, and other types of web dialog. Text analytics has enveloped the concept of text mining, an analysis approach influenced heavily from data mining. While text mining has been covered extensively in various computer…

For most students assessment guides their study and learning practice. Yet in the literature associated with the first year of study at university, few have mobilised the power of assessment to develop and engage first year undergraduate students. This paper presents a model of assessment for first year students which separates the semester into…

U.S. students spend too little time and effort on academics in high school, compared with harder-working young people in China and India, according to a new documentary being shown to "thought leaders" in states holding presidential primaries this winter. The documentary, conceived and financed by high-tech entrepreneur Robert A.…

Two Maryland colleges (one a four-year liberal arts college for women, and one a public community college) have worked to increase the number of graduates, especially women and other under-represented groups, in their computer science, computer information systems, engineering, and mathematics programs over a four-year period. In August 2004, they…

This paper reports on the students' experiments of using blogs to encourage themselves to do pre-class reading assignment and reflections after class. The sample in the study included five ESL (English as a Second Language) graduate students in a course of teaching methods, and 90 software engineering students in an undergraduate information…

Although group project concepts and skills have become a major component in most information systems (IS) academic programs, very little research has attempted to examine factors that may improve or undermine effectiveness of IS group projects. Accordingly, based on relevant literatures, this study develops and empirically tests a model of factors…

It has been well established in the literature that girls are turning their backs on computing courses at all levels of the education system. One reason given for this is that the computer learning environment is not conducive to girls, and it is often suggested that they would benefit from learning computing in a single-sex environment. The…

This article, based on a longitudinal, ethnographic study among engineering students, examines the interactional processes surrounding second language (L2) socialization. L2 socialization perspectives argue that the cognitive and the social are interconnected, and that learning an L2 is a process of coming to understand socially constructed…

Expert programmers possess schemas, abstractions of concrete experiences, which help them solve programming problems and lessen the load on their working memory during problem solving. Possession of schemas is a key difference between novices and experts, which is why instructors need to help students construct them. One recent tool for…