@article{zahn_gransbury_heckman_battestilli_2023, title={Assessment of Self-Identified Learning Struggles in CS2 Programming Assignments}, url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3587102.3588786}, DOI={10.1145/3587102.3588786}, abstractNote={Students can have widely varying experiences while working on CS2 coding projects. Challenging experiences can lead to lower motivation and less success in completing these assignments. In this paper, we identify the common struggles CS2 students face while working on course projects and examine whether or not there is evidence of improvement in these areas of struggle between projects. While previous work has been conducted on understanding the importance of self-regulated learning to student success, it has not been fully investigated in the scope of CS2 coursework. We share our observations on investigating student struggles while working on coding projects through their self-reported response to a project reflection form. We apply emergent coding to identify student struggles at three points during the course and compare them against student actions in the course, such as project start times and office hours participation, to identify if students were overcoming these struggles. Through our coding and analysis we have found that while a majority of students encounter struggles with time management and debugging of failing tests, students tend to emphasize wanting to improve their time management skills in future coding assignments.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2023 CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION, ITICSE 2023, VOL 1}, author={Zahn, Matthew and Gransbury, Isabella and Heckman, Sarah and Battestilli, Lina}, year={2023}, pages={264–270} }
 @article{zahn_heckman_2023, title={Observations on Student Help-Seeking Behaviors in Introductory Computer Science Courses}, url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3545947.3576325}, DOI={10.1145/3545947.3576325}, abstractNote={The help-seeking interactions faculty encounter will vary depending upon the course structure and the students enrolled. While the course structure tends to remain the same, the students enrolled change each semester, presenting a new set of students who seek help in many different ways. We share our observations in investigating student behavior when using course resources, including office hours and online discussion forums, in two introductory computer science courses. Our goal is to explore differences in help-seeking behavior to construct Student "Help-Seeking" Personas. Preliminary analysis has shown that, for these two introductory CS courses, there are no well-defined personas that emerge from the grouping of help-seeking behaviors. The demographic of students exhibiting various help-seeking behaviors tends to be a near-proportionate subset of the overall course demographic. Thus, no distinct personas emerge from the students' help-seeking behaviors in introductory CS courses that faculty can utilize to better understand their students.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 54TH ACM TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION, VOL 2, SIGCSE 2023}, author={Zahn, Matthew and Heckman, Sarah}, year={2023}, pages={1380–1380} }