Asee peer logo

Board 60: Work in Progress: Student Perspectives of Collaborative Learning Techniques (CoLT) in Introductory Computing Classes

Download Paper |

Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

June 26, 2024

Conference Session

Computers in Education Division (COED) Poster Session

Tagged Division

Computers in Education Division (COED)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47058

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47058

Download Count

66

Paper Authors

biography

Lisa Cullington Sacred Heart University

visit author page

Lisa Cullington, Ph.D. is an educational researcher with expertise in academic program development, learning outcomes, and educational assessment best practices. She focuses on building and evaluating academic programs that promote inclusive excellence for all learners. Currently, Dr. Cullington serves as the Associate Provost of Academic Programs at Sacred Heart University. Previously, she was the Founding Co-Chair of the Honors Program at SUNY Farmingdale and Associate Director of the Research Aligned Mentorship (RAM) Program where she designed, implemented, and evaluated academic programs to engage students from historically minoritized communities in undergraduate research opportunities. She has served as a principal investigator and educational researcher on number grant initiatives, including grants from the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Education.

visit author page

biography

Mary V Villani Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York

visit author page

Mary V. Villani is an Associate Professor at Farmingdale State College (FSC) in the Computer Systems Department. She holds a doctoral degree from Pace University, the Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems. Her dissertation topic was Keystroke Biometric Identification on Long-Text Input. Publications in this area include peer-reviewed journal articles, and a co-authored book chapter, in Behavioral Biometrics for Human Identification: Intelligent Applications. Dr. Villani has been actively seeking funding internally and externally to address gender disparity and broaden participation in the Computing Programs at FSC. The money raised through campus grants and other funding sources was used to provide Women Student Orientation programs, and to take students to women in computing events. Dr. Villani has been active publishing and presenting these experiences in an effort to share within the research community and to ultimately broaden participation.  Dr. Villani is the co-advisor of the Supporting Women in Computing Club where she has mentored many women students in the program. Dr. Villani is the recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence, 2012. Prior to joining FSC, Dr. Villani had a 15 year computer consulting career in the Risk Management and Insurance Industry.

visit author page

biography

Nur Dean Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0009-0009-0589-0958

visit author page

Nur Dean is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Systems Department at Farmingdale State College in New York. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York and holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Hofstra University in New York. With a primary research focus on Game Theory and Social Networks, Dr. Dean also harbors a keen interest in Machine Learning classification. Passionate about mentoring undergraduate students, she has guided many in the realms of Game Theory and Machine Learning. Additionally, Dr. Dean has contributed her expertise as a judge at regional events such as the New York State Science and Engineering Fair (NYSSEF) and the WAC Lighting Invitational Science Fair.

visit author page

biography

Moaath Alrajab Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York

visit author page

Moaath Alrajab serves as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Systems Department at Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Leeds, UK, and completed his Master of Science in Mobile Computing at Bradford University, UK. His undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering was attained from Albaath University in Homs, Syria. Before transitioning to academia, he worked as a software engineer.

Dr. Alrajab's research focuses on Machine Vision and AI. He is dedicated to supporting women in computing and advocating for increased diversity in the field. Additionally, Dr. Alrajab holds the position of chair for the department curriculum committee and is a member of the college-wide curriculum committee.

visit author page

biography

Arthur Hoskey Farmingdale State College SUNY, New York

visit author page

Arthur Hoskey is a Professor of Computer Systems at Farmingdale State College in New York. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center and received his B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Purchase. Dr. Hoskey worked as a software engineer prior to starting his academic career.

Dr. Hoskey's primary line of research has been around innovative pedagogical methods. One line of research was a collaboration with faculty from multiple State University of New York colleges on a project to explore and develop a semi-standardized and accessible introduction to computer science course (SUNY IITG funded research), focused on teaching computational thinking skills. Another line of research was the development of a simulated operating system, SimpleOS, that allowed students to run basic programs and visually see the state of the simulated memory, registers, and process queues in order to facilitate student learning. Dr. Hoskey has also collaborated with the Farmingdale State College Center for Applied Mathematics and Brookhaven National Laboratory on an undergraduate research program in the area of Signal Analysis. Dr. Hoskey received the 2017 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching from the State University of New York.

visit author page

biography

Ilknur Aydin Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York

visit author page

Ilknur Aydin is an Associate Professor of Computer Systems at Farmingdale State College, SUNY, New York. Dr. Aydin's research is in the general area of wireless and mobile networks with a focus on transport layer issues including multihoming, SCTP, congestion control, and network coding. Dr. Aydin has mentored undergraduate and high school students on research projects that involve the use of Arduino boxes and Raspberry Pi's in the context of Internet of Things, and the use of public testbeds such as CloudLab and FABRIC for WiFi and cellular networking research. Dr. Aydin has been a vivid supporter of women in computing and increasing diversity in computing. She has been the co-faculty advisor for Women in Computing club at Farmingdale, contributed in Grace Hopper Celebration as a technical committee member and reviewer. Dr. Aydin has published and presented in peer reviewed venues about women in computing and broadening the participation over a decade. Dr. Aydin is the 2023 recipient of the Farmingdale Foundation Excellence Award for faculty service.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Interest in computing related majors as grown amongst college students in the United States. Despite this growing interest, retention and graduation rates are a concern for many regional, public universities such as XYZ College. Educational researchers have demonstrated the benefits of increasing student sense of belonging (SoB) and academic self-concept (ASC) on academic outcomes. In this study, we explore the interaction between implementing collaborative learning techniques (CoLT) in a CSC 101 Introduction to Computing course with students’ SoB and ASC. Given the social constructivist perspective that frames CoLTs and these techniques’ ability to engage students authentically in course content, we hypothesize that the implementation of CoLTs will positively impact students’ SoB and ASC. At present, this study is a work-in-progress. Students in the Fall 2023 section of CSC 101 piloted a pre- and post-survey to measure their SoB and ASC.T This survey will be implemented in three sections of the CSC 101 course in Spring 2024. Additionally, students were interviewed about their experiences in the CoLT course. In this paper, overall research design, preliminary survey responses from Fall 2023, study discussion, and future work with limitations will be reviewed.

Cullington, L., & Villani, M. V., & Dean, N., & Alrajab, M., & Hoskey, A., & Aydin, I. (2024, June), Board 60: Work in Progress: Student Perspectives of Collaborative Learning Techniques (CoLT) in Introductory Computing Classes Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47058

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015