Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Zilles, Craig
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
CSEducation
Pattern Oriented Instruction
CS1
Abstract
"When designing and planning the implementation of software, expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally ""chunking"" groups of lines of code into a single abstraction. These chunks have been referred to as patterns in CS1 literature and pattern-oriented instruction has been proposed. This thesis builds on the existing literature by analyzing instructor solutions to the assessments of a diverse collection of seven CS1 courses to identify the patterns that students are expected to learn. In particular, I make two contributions. First, I provide a catalog of the patterns that I identified. Second, I present analysis based on detailed records of which patterns occurred in which assessments. Results include the relative frequency of each pattern in all the assessments and the order in which patterns appeared in each course. I hope that this analysis enables instructors to be more conscientious and explicit in how these patterns are introduced to their students."
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