Jana Jackova

There is an increasing trend to use national survey instruments to measure student engagement. Unfortunately, Computer Science (CS) rates poorly on a number of measures in these surveys, even when compared to related STEM disciplines. Initial research suggests reasons for this poor performance may include a lack of awareness by CS academics of these instruments and the student engagement measures on which they are based, and a misalignment between these measures and the research focus (and teaching practice) of CS educators. This working group carried out an investigation of major engagement instruments to examine the measures they embody and track the achievement of CS with respect to the major international benchmarks. A comprehensive research mapping exercise was then conducted to examine the focus of current CS education research and its alignment to student engagement measures on which the instruments are based. The process enabled identification of examples of best practice in student engagement research in CS education. In order to better understand CS academics' perspectives on engagement a series of interviews were also conducted with CS staff. Our findings indicate that CS engagement results are, if anything, declining further. Analysis of CS education research literature shows that many authors refer to ``engagement'' (and their aim to increase it) but few attach a clear meaning to the term or offer evidence to support a link to improved engagement. Further, many initiatives reported would be unlikely to tick the boxes of the narrow, behaviourally-focussed measures covered by the major instruments. Staff interviews revealed a wide variety of beliefs about what student engagement means and what should be done to promote it in CS, including the view that many activities measured in the instruments are counter-productive for CS. This work aims to promote a greater awareness of the international benchmarks and the aspects of student engagement they measure. The results reported here can be used by CS educators to inform decisions on strategies to improve engagement and how these might relate to existing survey measures.

We describe a pilot research study within the project "Innovative methods in teaching Informatics in secondary education". We introduce some results of a survey regarding the content of the school subject Informatics in lower and upper secondary education in Slovakia. We plan to develop some new educational materials for further education of informatics teachers.

It is often debated whether a problem presented in a straightforward minimalist fashion is better, or worse, for learning than the same problem presented with a real-life or concrete context. The presentation, contextualization, or problem description has been well studied over several decades in disciplines such as mathematics education and psychology; however, little has been published in the field of computing education. In psychology it has been found that not only the presence of context, but the type of context can have dramatic results on problem success. In mathematics education it has been demonstrated that there are non-mathematical factors in problem presentation that can affect success in solving the problem and learning. The contextual background of a problem can also impact cognitive load, which should be considered when evaluating the effects of context. Further, it has been found that regarding cognitive load, computer science has unique characteristics compared to other disciplines, with the consequence that results from other disciplines may not apply to computer science, thus requiring investigation within computer science

In two special issues of the ACM journal \"Transactions on Computing Education\" (TOCE), 14 extensive case studies about the various situations of Computer Science Education (CSE) in K-12 schools in 12 countries (respectively states) were collected. During the work at the ITiCSE 2015, we have performed a deductive qualitative text analysis on these case studies in order to extract the most useful information. As a category system, we applied some selected categories of the Darmstadt Model that was developed by the working group \"Computer Science/Informatics in Secondary Schools\" at the ITiCSE 2011. Based on the coding results, we summarized information about the different fields of Computing Education at schools, the intended goals and competencies, the taught content, the applied programming languages and tools and the different forms of assessment and teacher education. Despite the limitations of the analyzed articles, representing just snapshots of complex situations from the specific viewpoint of the respective authors, we were able to collect some interesting results.

A Contributing Student Pedagogy (CSP) is a pedagogy that encourages students to contribute to the learning of others and to value the contributions of others. CSP in formal education is anticipatory of learning processes found in industry and research, in which the roles and responsibilities of 'teacher' and 'student' are fluid. Preparing students for this shift is one motivation for use of CSP. Further, CSP approaches are linked to constructivist and community theories of learning, and provide opportunities to engage students more deeply in subject material. In this paper we advance the concept of CSP and relate it to the particular needs of computer science. We present a number of characteristics of this approach, and use case studies from the available literature to illustrate these characteristics in practice. We discuss enabling technologies, provide guidance to instructors who would like to incorporate this approach in their teaching, and suggest some future directions for the study and evaluation of this technique. We conclude with an extensive bibliography of related research and case studies which exhibit elements of CSP.

Teachers always look for new ways to make their teaching more effective. "The data show that mastery learning programs have positive effects on student achievement" [1]. We introduce work in progress of an educational research of teaching/learning (T/L) effectiveness in case the Mastery Learning (ML) approach is used in an introductory course of programming.

Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain and the SOLO taxonomy are being increasingly widely used in the design and assessment of courses, but there are some drawbacks to their use in computer science. This paper reviews the literature on educational taxonomies and their use in computer science education, identifies some of the problems that arise, proposes a new taxonomy and discusses how this can be used in application-oriented courses such as programming.