Recent Publications

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Through a series of multi-university user studies with computer science learners, I developed a novel data-grounded theory that captures and describes the various facets of students' program design skills and processes, and the cognitive processes that underlie these.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute Doctoral Dissertation

We identified patterns of high- and low-level thinking that relate to students' success on programming problems, and propose a concrete framework of high- and low-level cognitive interactions that summarizes the transitions that we observed.
In 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ‘20), ACM.

We present a theoretical framework we developed from our study of novice programmers. We discuss the cognitive interactions that occur as novices tackle the high-level tasks of a problem and think about the low-level code implementations of these tasks.
In Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘19), ACM.

We explored the incidence of the Einstellung effect among student programmers and how this phenomenon may influence the programming performance of students.
In 1st Information and Computing Education Conference (ICE ‘18), CSP.

My research explores how novice programmers design programs, the design-related skills students learn and use, and the factors that drive their design decisions.
In Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘18), ACM.

We present results from the first phase of a semi-longitudinal study on programmer design skills. We conducted a user study of novice programmers and developed a novel multi-faceted SOLO taxonomy of program design skills. The framework was based on interview and think-aloud protocols and programming data, which we used to track the evolution of programming skills across a program design course.
In 17th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling 2017), ACM.

We report on a study in which students in introductory courses at two universities were given a single lecture on program planning between assessments. In the post-assessment, many students produced multiple high-level plans and richly discussed tradeoffs between plans.
In 17th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling 2017), ACM.

We present results from a think-aloud study in which novice functional programmers worked on the Rainfall problem. We describe criteria that drove students to select and switch their high-level program schema when working on a multi-task planning problem.
In Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘17), ACM.

We explore learners' planning methods to identify effective pedagogical techniques for teaching program design strategies.
In Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘16), ACM.

Analysis of programming video protocols show that students overuse affordances of program design scaffolds in ways that lead to plan-composition errors.
In 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE ‘16), ACM.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Recent Posts

Media outlets report on our work on the Wearable Learning Cloud Platform, which K-12 learners can use to design and play math games that help develop computational thinking skills.

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PCSC 2017 in Cebu City, Philippines

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ITiCSE 2017 in Bologna, Italy

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Resume/CV

  • Resume (Updated: 09/19/2019)

Contact

  • francis.evgc @ gmail.com