Is abstraction the key to computing?
Communications of the ACM
The PeerWise system of student contributed assessment questions
ACE '08 Proceedings of the tenth conference on Australasian computing education - Volume 78
Ability to 'explain in plain english' linked to proficiency in computer-based programming
Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference on International computing education research
Concrete and other neo-Piagetian forms of reasoning in the novice programmer
ACE '11 Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference - Volume 114
Neo-piagetian theory as a guide to curriculum analysis
Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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Recent research has proposed Neo-Piagetian theory as a useful way of describing the cognitive development of novice programmers. Neo-Piagetian theory may also be a useful way to classify materials used in learning and assessment. If Neo-Piagetian coding of learning resources is to be useful then it is important that practitioners can learn it and apply it reliably. We describe the design of an interactive web-based tutorial for Neo-Piagetian categorization of assessment tasks. We also report an evaluation of the tutorial's effectiveness, in which twenty computer science educators participated. The average classification accuracy of the participants on each of the three Neo-Piagetian stages were 85%, 71% and 78%. Participants also rated their agreement with the expert classifications, and indicated high agreement (91%, 83% and 91% across the three Neo-Piagetian stages). Self-rated confidence in applying Neo-Piagetian theory to classifying programming questions before and after the tutorial were 29% and 75% respectively. Our key contribution is the demonstration of the feasibility of the Neo-Piagetian approach to classifying assessment materials, by demonstrating that it is learnable and can be applied reliably by a group of educators. Our tutorial is freely available as a community resource.