Informatics in Education

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student programming behavior can be modeled as a Markov process. The resulting transition matrix can then be used in machine learning algorithms to create clusters of similarly behaving students. We describe in detail the state machine used in the Markov process and how to compute the transition matrix. We compute the transition matrix for 665 students and cluster them using the k-means clustering algorithm. We choose the number of cluster to be three based on analysis of the dataset. We show that the created clusters have statistically different means for student prior knowledge in programming, when measured on a Likert scale of 1-5.

This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation. However, measuring motivation is complex, there are several scales already carried out to do that job, but only a few of them consider the longitudinal follow-up of motivation throughout the courses. The EVC Light was applied to 245 undergraduate students from four universities. The Omega coefficient, scale items intercorrelation, item-total correlation, and factor analysis are used to validate and measure the reliability of the instrument. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses supported the structure, consistency, and validity of the EVC Light scale. Moreover, a significant relationship between motivation and student results was identified, based mainly on the Expectancy and Cost factors.

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of the penetration of mobile technology through all strata of society. Mobile technologies including cell phones, tablets, and even some e-readers are used for surfing the web, running apps, reading email, posting to social media, conducting banking transactions, etc. This liberation from desktop and laptop machines and from the requirements of a specific geographic location raises concerns regarding the problems and challenges of maintaining security while traversing cyberspace. The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the attitudes, behaviors, and security practices of business students using mobile devices to access online resources. One group of students surveyed received no specific training regarding mobile security while a second group was surveyed following the completion of an online training program. Results show no significant difference in the security practices of the two groups, indicating that commercially available security training programs are largely inefficacious with respect to modifying student behavior and that additional research on training efficacy is needed.

Programming is one of the basic subjects in most informatics, computer science mathematics and technical faculties' curricula. Integrated overview of the models for teaching programming, problems in teaching and suggested solutions were presented in this paper. Research covered current state of 1019 programming subjects in 715 study programmes at total of 218 faculties and 143 universities in 35 European countries that were analyzed. It was concluded that while most of the programmes highly support object-oriented paradigm of programming, introductory programming subjects are mainly based on imperative paradigm.

While researchers working within the Student Learning Research framework have developed or adapted questionnaires to gather information on students' experiences of blended learning, no questionnaire has been developed to enquire about teachers' experiences in such learning environments. The present article reports the development and testing of a novel questionnaire on `approaches to e-teaching', which may be employed to investigate the experience of teaching when e-learning is involved. Results showed suitable reliability and validity. Also, when exploring associations between the novel questionnaire scales and those of the well-known `approaches to teaching' inventory (Prosser and Trigwell, 2006), results from correlation and cluster analyses suggest that student-focused approaches to teaching are needed for significant use of digital technology to emerge. For practice, this relevant outcome implies that teaching needs to be considered holistically when supporting teachers to incorporate e-learning in their practice: because it seems they approach online teaching coherently with the face-to-face side of the blended experience.