@article{oliveira_gao_heckman_lynch_2024, title={Exploring Novice Programmer Testing Behavior: A First Step to Define Coding Struggle}, url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630851}, DOI={10.1145/3626252.3630851}, abstractNote={To promote good coding practices, we need to understand what students do when they are on their own. In this research study, we explore students' testing behavior and response to persistent errors to better understand their coding patterns. We investigate how those patterns change when they struggle, and how help-seeking might influence their coding behaviors. We define struggle during coding as failing the same unit test case consecutively for more than four submission events, considering only unit test cases created by the instructors. To analyze the students' coding data, we use progress indicators, student test implementation indicators, and both student-generated and instructor-generated unit test results from each student submission event. In addition, we use office hours attendance records and amount of assignment-related posts created on the course forum. Results show that students tend not to follow test-driven development practices, even when explicitly directed to, and tend to create unit tests only to earn assignment credit rather than to guide their software development. Students also tend not to modify their own unit tests once they have earned the related credits, even when facing coding struggle; they tend to modify their unit tests only after they have been facing coding struggle for an extended number of submission events.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 55TH ACM TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION, SIGCSE 2024, VOL. 1}, author={Oliveira, Gabriel Silva and Gao, Zhikai and Heckman, Sarah and Lynch, Collin}, year={2024}, pages={1251–1257} }
 @inproceedings{gao_gaweda_lynch_heckman_babalola_oliveira_2024, title={Using Survival Analysis to Model Students' Patience in Online Office Hour Queues}, url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3626253.3635517}, DOI={10.1145/3626253.3635517}, abstractNote={Promptly and properly addressing students' help requests during office hours is a critical challenge for large CS courses. With a large number of help requests, the queue gets longer and students have to endure long wait times. To address this problem, we try to quantify students' patience in the queue through survival analysis. Our results show that half of the students are willing to stay in the queue after waiting for 142.5 minutes. Moreover, we find that female students, morning requests, returning students, and requests about test failures are more likely to stay in the queue for a longer time.}, author={Gao, Zhikai and Gaweda, Adam and Lynch, Collin and Heckman, Sarah and Babalola, Damilola and Oliveira, Gabriel Silva}, year={2024}, month={Mar} }
 @article{gao_heckman_lynch_2022, title={Who Uses Office Hours? A Comparison of In-Person and Virtual Office Hours Utilization}, DOI={10.1145/3478431.3499334}, abstractNote={In Computer Science (CS) education, instructors use office hours for one-on-one help-seeking. Prior work has shown that traditional in-person office hours may be underutilized. In response many instructors are adding or transitioning to virtual office hours. Our research focuses on comparing in-person and online office hours to investigate differences between performance, interaction time, and the characteristics of the students who utilize in-person and virtual office hours. We analyze a rich dataset covering two semesters of a CS2 course which used in-person office hours in Fall 2019 and virtual office hours in Fall 2020. Our data covers students' use of office hours, the nature of their questions, and the time spent receiving help as well as demographic and attitude data. Our results show no relationship between student's attendance in office hours and class performance. However we found that female students attended office hours more frequently, as did students with a fixed mindset in computing, and those with weaker skills in transferring theory to practice. We also found that students with low confidence in or low enjoyment toward CS were more active in virtual office hours. Finally, we observed a significant correlation between students attending virtual office hours and an increased interest in CS study; while students attending in-person office hours tend to show an increase in their growth mindset.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 53RD ACM TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION (SIGCSE 2022), VOL 1}, author={Gao, Zhikai and Heckman, Sarah and Lynch, Collin}, year={2022}, pages={300–306} }