The aim of this graduation theses is to explore one of the theme of the contemporary educational reform in Czech republic what is development of creativeness at the basic school education. This question is outlined in general terms in the firs part of the theses and subsequently developed on the subject of physics education. Special emphasis is placed on the comparing of standard creativeness developing instruments and usage of computing technologies by computer supported education what is another essential item of current education. Significant part of this thesis deals with the software for the basic school physics education and its evaluation. The theses ends with the experiment with pupils of a basic school that should compare these two creativeness developing instruments mentioned above and give impetus to another research in this subject.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the status of computer science teacher certification in the United States. Methods used included a survey of chief teacher certification officers in all fifty states to determine the status of each state concerning the certification of high school computer science teachers and a survey of forty selected leaders in the field of computer science education to determine the current and future status of computer science education and to identify the courses most appropriate for computer science teacher training programs. Status reports on all fifty states were presented. Summaries for the states that offer certification in computer science as a field by itself and as a part of another subject field were provided. Five state-approved computer science certification programs were reviewed.

This work analyzes theoretical and practical aspects of computer literacy acquisition. The theoretical determination of the term "computer literacy" together with other aspects is defining a scope for analysing the computer literacy of VŠE students after attending basic university-wide compulsory IT subjects. The aim of this work is investigation of the current computer knowledge level, whether the knowledge achieved is sufficient for students for professional career, which involves use of computer for routine agenda. Therefore a survey of computer knowledge of selected top companies on our market is attached. According to confrontation between students and companies, in case of variance, proposals for an improvement of computer literacy at VŠE will be outlined.

Vista University is known in South Africa as a historically disadvantaged or black university. It is a multi-campus university (it has eight campuses throughout South Africa) and caters for learners from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics holds an annual meeting to coordinate the activities in the department across all eight campuses. Attendance is compulsory for all lecturers from all the campuses. Every year the same problem arises, which is to have examination papers drawn up that will be of a uniform standard across all the campuses. It is a very frustrating task for the compiler of the papers to get contributions from the lecturers that are submitted on time, in the agreed format and of an acceptable standard. During the 2000 meeting it was unanimously agreed that the long-term solution to the problem would be a database of questions in the agreed format and of an acceptable standard. Because the lecturers are spread over South Africa, this database must be available through Vista’s Intranet. The development of such a product would involve a great deal of time and energy, and the most important question to ask is whether the lecturers would use the product. The solution is to design a prototype of the product: a database with a Web-based portal populated with a sample of questions. The usability of such a database must be determined to ensure the effectiveness of the final product. The aim of this study is, after a prototype of a Web-based Statistical Data and Story Library in the South African Context (in future referred to as SSS) has been implemented, to determine the usability of the product. Copyright 2001, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Basson, EM 2001, The usability of a computer-based Statistics Data and Story Library in the South African context, MEd dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-02042002-094953 / > / Thesis (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2001. / Curriculum Studies / MEd / Unrestricted

One role of an administrator is to provide and assess staff development programs. The purpose of this study was to measure the impact of a 120-hour standards-based, technology-connnected staff development program on participating teachers' instruction.

The purpose of this study was to determine if computer technology is an effective tool for raising student achievement in education. Much of the related research indicated there is a pressing need for educators, at both the school site and district levels, to develop accurate assessment tools to accurately determine the most effective use of computers as it applies to instructional technology.

A seemingly unexplored territory in teaching computer programming is transcription labs. With transcription referring to "transcribe" in the sense of "to make an exact copy of". In transcription labs students are given the complete code and are asked to transcribe it into their own window before they are able to run it. This approach may be interesting as it forces students to engage with the material more than if they had been given a runnable program outright, while still providing a limited, and in some sense safe, learning environment. This project focuses on creating a web application for transcription labs to serve as a jump-off point into exploration of such labs.  Additionally, this thesis contains a preliminary study that aims at gauging if further exploration of transcription labs is worthwhile. The result of the preliminary study indicates that the answer to that question is yes, it is worthwhile exploring transcription labs further.

Syftet med studien var att undersöka vilka stöd som matematiklärare erbjudits relativt programmering i matematikundervisningen. Därtill avsåg studien att undersöka vad matematiklärare önskar av ett stöd relativt programmering i matematik. Två datainsamlingsmetoder användes: en webbaserad enkät, och en semistrukturerad intervju. 29 enkätsvar erhölls och tre intervjuer genomfördes. Urvalspopulationen för dessa var matematiklärare i Stockholmsområdet. De insamlade data bearbetades med kvalitativ innehållsanalys där olika kategorier med tillhörande koder framkom, för att beskriva lärares uppfattningar av begreppet lärarstöd samt lärarnas åsikter om lärarstöd. Av enkätsvaren erhölls att 11 av 29 lärare upplevde att de inte erbjudits stöd för programmering i matematikundervisningen. Baserat på studiens resultat utvecklades ett lärarstödförslag vars syfte är att motsvara lärarnas önskemål på lärarstöd. Lärarstödförslaget består av ett upplägg för kompetensutveckling och lektionsplaner. / The purpose of the study was to examine which aids relative to programming in mathematics education the mathematics teachers have been offered. Moreover, the study sought to examine the desiderata of the mathematics teachers, relative to aid in programming in mathematics education. Two means of collecting data were used: a web based questionnaire, and a semi structured interview. 29 responses to the questionnaire were collected and three interviews were conducted. The sample population for the study was mathematics teachers in the Stockholm region. The collected data were processed with qualitative content analysis where different categories and codes emerged. The categories and codes describe the teachers’ understanding of the term teacher-aid, and the teachers’ opinion of teacher-aid. The questionnaire responses indicate that 11 of 29 teachers did not perceive that they were offered aid relative to programming in mathematics education. A teacher-aid-proposal with the purpose to match the desiderata of the teachers with respect to teacher-aids. The teacher-aid-proposal consists of a competence development arrangement and lesson plans.

This master's thesis explores the effectiveness of an educational intervention using an interactive notebook to support and supplement instruction in a foundational-level programming course. A quantitative, quasi-experimental group comparison method was employed, where students were placed into either a control or a treatment group. Data was collected from assignment and final grades, as well as self-reported time spent using the notebook. Independent t-tests and correlation were used for data analysis. Results were inconclusive but did indicate that the intervention had a possible effect. Further studies may explore better efficacy, implementation, and satisfaction of interactive notebooks across a larger population and multiple class topics.

The Swedish government has decided to add programming to the Swedish curriculum to strengthen students’ digital skills. The teachers who will teach programming do not always know programming themselves. Because of that, KTH Royal Institute of Technology researchers are planning to start an initiative of creating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in fundamental programming in Swedish for those teachers. Interpreting error messages given by the compiler is one problem with learning programming. An aim of this study is to lower that threshold. The study seeks to identify common misconceptions about programming among novice programmers in order to design a static analyser that investigates code written by students and provides formative feedback to help students in their own learning process. The study combines the constructivist theory of learning with views about formative assessment in order to automate the process that is usually done by a teacher or teaching assistant when assessing code. A phenomenographic study is done in order to identify teachers’ perceptions of common misconceptions about programming by interviewing five active teachers at KTH. The results of that study are used to construct code examples that correspond to these misconceptions. Those results lead to the design and implementation of a software that detects these problems in code. That software is evaluated using a larger set of test data, consisting of 77 errors divided into five larger programs, inserted by independent individuals. From the initial study, five categories of misconceptions are given. Of the 77 errors, the majority are correctly positioned and almost all are given a good hint about the position. About a quarter of the errors are parse errors, which never reach the analysing part of the software that demands the program to be parsable. The study shows that we have succeeded both in designing and implementing a software that detects the identified misconceptions with good results. In the context of a MOOC, the software might require an extension with a more advanced parser and also dynamic analysis to be able to test the correctness of the students’ programs. The software is limited to handle the language Javascriptish, which is a subset of JavaScript. / För att stärka den digitala kompetensen bland svenska grundskole och gymnasieelever har programmering lagts in i läroplanen. De lärare som är tänkta att hålla i denna programmeringsundervisning har själva inte alltid tillräckliga kunskaper i programmering, varpå ett initiativ för att hålla en storskalig, öppen och internetbaserad kurs (MOOC) på svenska har startats av forskare på Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH). En av svårigheterna med att lära sig programmering är att förstå meddelandena som kompilatorn ger. Ett mål med denna studie är att sänka denna tröskel för studenten. Denna studie ämnar identifiera vanliga missuppfattningar om programmering hos nybörjare, för att designa en programvara som utför statisk analys av kod skriven av studenter och därefter ge återkoppling kring dessa missuppfattningar. Studien kombinerar den konstruktivistiska teorin om lärande med tankar om formativ bedömning för att automatisera den process som vanligtvis görs av en lärare eller lärarassistent vid bedömning av kod. En fenomenografisk studie görs för att identifiera lärares uppfattningar om vanliga missuppfattningar kring programmering genom att intervjua fem verksamma lärare på KTH. Resultatet från den studien används sedan för att konstruera kodexempel som belyser de identifierade missuppfattningarna. Därefter designas och implementeras en mjukvara som sedan evalueras genom att analysera totalt 77 fel, konstruerade av oberoende individer, uppdelade på fem större program. Den initiala studien resulterar i fem olika kategorier av missuppfattningar. Av de 77 evaluerade felen ger majoriteten en korrekt positionsangivelse och nästan alla ger en god indikation över var felet ligger. Omkring en fjärdedel av felen är parsningsfel, vilka aldrig når huvudmjukvaran som kräver att programmet är parsningsbart. Studien visar att vi lyckas designa och implementera en programvara som med goda resultat upptäcker vanliga missuppfattningar kring programmering hos nybörjare, baserat på det teoretiska ramverket. I kontexten av en kurs på internet kan programvaran behöva utvecklas med en mer avancerad syntaxanalys (eng. parser) samt lägga till dynamisk analys av program för att även kunna testa programmens korrekthet. Programvaran är begränsad till att analysera kod skriven i språket Javascriptish, vilken är en delmängd till JavaScript.