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[Abstract]: The traditional approach to training novice programmers has been to provide explicit programming knowledge instruction but to rely on implicit instruction of programming strategies. Studies, reported in literature, have discovered universally poor results on standardised tests for novices studying under this traditional approach.This dissertation describes the explicit integration of programming strategies into instruction and assessment of novice programmers, and the impact of this change ontheir learning outcomes.An initial experiment was used to measure the performance of students studying under a traditional curriculum with implicitly taught programming strategies. Thisexperiment uncovered common flaws in the strategy skills of novices and revealed weaknesses in the curriculum. Incorporation of explicit strategy instruction wasproposed.To validate a model of strategies as being authentic and appropriate for novice instruction, an experiment with experts was conducted. Experts were asked to solvethree problems that a novice would typically be expected to solve at the end of an introductory programming course. Experts‟ solutions were analysed using Goal/PlanAnalysis and it was discovered that experts consistently applied plans, the subalgorithmic strategies suggested by Soloway (1986). It was proposed that plans could be adapted for explicit inclusion in an introductory programming curriculum.Initially a curriculum incorporating explicit strategy instruction was tested in an artificial setting with a small number of volunteers, divided into control andexperimental groups. The control group was taught using a simplified traditional curriculum and the experimental group were exposed to a curriculum which explicitly included programming strategies. Testing revealed that experimental group participants applied plans more than control group participants, who had been expected to learn these strategies implicitly. In interviews, experimental participants used strategy-related terminology and were more confident in the solutions they had created. These results justified a trial of the curriculum in an actual introductory programming course.When explicit instruction of programming strategies was incorporated into an actual introductory programming curriculum, novices achieved superior results whencompared to results from the initial experiment. Novices used strategies significantly more when these strategies were incorporated explicitly into instructional materialsand assessment items.This series of experiments focussed on explicitly teaching specific programming strategies rather than teaching problem-solving more generally. These experimentalresults demonstrate that explicit incorporation of programming strategies may improve outcomes for novices and potentially improve the potential of expertprogrammers in future.

[Abstract]: The traditional approach to training novice programmers has been to provide explicit programming knowledge instruction but to rely on implicit instruction of programming strategies. Studies, reported in literature, have discovered universally poor results on standardised tests for novices studying under this traditional approach.This dissertation describes the explicit integration of programming strategies into instruction and assessment of novice programmers, and the impact of this change ontheir learning outcomes.An initial experiment was used to measure the performance of students studying under a traditional curriculum with implicitly taught programming strategies. Thisexperiment uncovered common flaws in the strategy skills of novices and revealed weaknesses in the curriculum. Incorporation of explicit strategy instruction wasproposed.To validate a model of strategies as being authentic and appropriate for novice instruction, an experiment with experts was conducted. Experts were asked to solvethree problems that a novice would typically be expected to solve at the end of an introductory programming course. Experts‟ solutions were analysed using Goal/PlanAnalysis and it was discovered that experts consistently applied plans, the subalgorithmic strategies suggested by Soloway (1986). It was proposed that plans could be adapted for explicit inclusion in an introductory programming curriculum.Initially a curriculum incorporating explicit strategy instruction was tested in an artificial setting with a small number of volunteers, divided into control andexperimental groups. The control group was taught using a simplified traditional curriculum and the experimental group were exposed to a curriculum which explicitly included programming strategies. Testing revealed that experimental group participants applied plans more than control group participants, who had been expected to learn these strategies implicitly. In interviews, experimental participants used strategy-related terminology and were more confident in the solutions they had created. These results justified a trial of the curriculum in an actual introductory programming course.When explicit instruction of programming strategies was incorporated into an actual introductory programming curriculum, novices achieved superior results whencompared to results from the initial experiment. Novices used strategies significantly more when these strategies were incorporated explicitly into instructional materialsand assessment items.This series of experiments focussed on explicitly teaching specific programming strategies rather than teaching problem-solving more generally. These experimentalresults demonstrate that explicit incorporation of programming strategies may improve outcomes for novices and potentially improve the potential of expertprogrammers in future.

Using the Student Investment Fund at Claremont McKenna College as a proxy for inexperienced investors, I demonstrate that inexperienced investors using fundamental analysis produce momentum-like buying patterns. The results show that the Student Investment Fund is on average buying stocks that outperform Carhart’s four-factor asset pricing model in the year before purchase. As a result, the Student Investment Fund has, on average, underperformed the S&P500 by .48% per year since 1996. My thesis explores why the Student Investment Fund may have adopted momentum-like purchasing patterns and what steps can be taken to remedy it.

NO-undervisningen idag ställer stora krav att lärarna ska erbjuda eleverna möjligheter att utveckla sina förmågor inom NO. I grundskolans årskurser 4-6 tilldelas de naturorienterande ämnena få antal timmar vilket leder till att många lärare känner en tidspress inför att hinna med det centrala innehållet inom det angivna tidsutrymmet. Utmaningen blir än mer problematisk av det faktum att bra, pedagogiskt läromedel ofta saknas. En pedagogisk modell som ofta används inom de naturvetenskapliga ämnena är ett elevaktivt öppet undersökande arbetssätt där eleverna får lära sig genom att utforma sina egna undersökningar i och om ämnet. Syftet med den här undersökningen är att belysa tankar, attityder och åsikter kring användandet av IBSE. Vilka möjligheter och hinder anser lärare att det finns med att använda IBSE? och hur påverkas attityderna beroende på deras arbetserfarenhet? Tre lärare med olika lång tid inom yrket intervjuades med semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultatet av den här undersökningen visar att mer erfarna lärare känner sig mer bekväma med att använda IBSE än vad nya lärare gör. Flera kategorier identifieras som hinder och möjligheter. Samtidigt finns det flera likheter mellan de olika grupperna gällande vilka möjligheter och hinder man identifierar med IBSE och hur man lägger upp effektiv och elevaktiverande undervisning. / Biology education in primary schools today puts demands on teachers to develop classroom situations where students get the opportunity to develop their science abilities. In primary school, grade 4-6, the science subjects are assigned a few hours per week and many teachers feel stressed about dealing with the science curriculum’s content in the little amount of time assigned. The challenge gets even more complex by the fact that the lack of good, pedagogically teaching aid is severe. A pedagogically teaching method that is often used in science education is an inquiry approach where students learn by making their own inquiries in and about the subject science. This paper aims to elucidate teachers’ thoughts and attitudes towards an inquiry based science education. What possibilities and what difficulties are there for teachers using an inquiry approach? And how does that relate to the length of their experience as teachers? Three teachers were interviewed with semi-structured interview. The study concludes that more experienced teachers feel more secure and have a higher reliability with an inquiry based science education than newly graduated teachers have. There were different categories both with possibilities and difficulties. Simultaneously, there are several similarities between the two different groups of teachers according to difficulties and opportunities with an inquiry approach, and how to conduct an efficient education that is student centered and student dedicating.

Within programming there are many problems that can occur throughout a coding process.Various solutions exist to different problems and sometimes a design pattern has beenestablished for a specific problem. Design patterns are established solutions to a commonproblem developers can face while coding. To choose one of the design patterns that fits theproblem can be challenging depending on the developer.This study focused on collecting data on inexperienced developers' experience in choosing adesign pattern. This study has limited itself to four different approaches to choose a designpattern. Selected approaches are: Scan intent section, study how patterns interrelate, Examinecause of redesign and Killer”Killer examples'' for design patterns. The approaches have beenselected from other sources that have described them in detail. These chosen approaches havebeen used to test five inexperienced developers and collect data on their experience withchoosing a design pattern. The results of the chosen approaches have collected data with thehelp of a usability testing method and semi-structured interview. The data have been analyzedwith the help of a thematic analysis. The thematic analysis resulted in five themes: Info notfound, Difficulties in understanding design patterns, Uncertainties when selecting designpatterns, Effective approaches and Familiar with approaches. The Findings from these themesand their codes have revealed multiple issues when selecting a design pattern. Findings alsoestablished what participants thought were effective approaches according to their ownexperience working with these approaches.

Test-driven development is a software development practice that prompts developers to write tests before writing source code. Studies report varied results on the effects that test-driven development has on the development process, and how this practice compares to other development practices, such as more traditional test-last development methodologies. There also seems like there has not been a discussion around the possible problems that a developer could encounter when adopting this technique, something that seems relevant to making accurate assumptions on the usability of the practice. A literature review was conducted, where the subject of test-driven development is examined with a focus on how inexperienced programmers interact with the practice and what effect it has on the product, in terms of external quality, productivity, number of test written and test coverage. The results suggest that there are no significant differences in external quality and productivity between TDD and TLD. The results also suggest that divide and conquer and refactoring are skills that ease the process of adopting the test-driven development practice.

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Context: Games involve people to a large extent where they relate themselves with the game characters; this is commonly known as game immersion. Generally, some players play games for enjoyment, some for stress relaxation and so on.Game immersion is usually used to describe the degree of involvement with a game. When people play games, they don’t necessarily realize that they have been dissociated with the surrounding world. Real world dissociation (RWD) can be defined as the situation where a player is less aware of the surroundings outside the game than about what is happening in the game itself. The RWD factor has been expected to measure the losing track of time, lack of awareness of surroundings and mental transportation. Objectives: In this thesis, we measure and compare the difference in game immersion between experienced and inexperienced players using RWD factor. In addition, the study involves exploring the significance of game immersion and various approaches used to measure it. Methods: In this study literature review has been carried out to explore the meaning of game immersion and further user studies in the form of an experiment has been conducted to measure game immersion between experienced and inexperienced gamers. The game immersion has been measured using the real world dissociation (RWD) factor. After the experiment has been conducted, a statistical technique has been carried out to measure the difference in game immersion among the two groups. Results:The empirical investigation on the measurement of game immersion has been done using RWD factor. The results state that the significance value is less than 0.05 and hence null hypothesis is rejected for both the games. The measurable difference has been calculated by using Cohen’s d effect size between experienced and inexperienced players. The Cohen’s d value between experienced players and inexperienced players for Dota 2 is 0.7423 and CS:GO is 0.8383. Conclusions: After analyzing the data and calculating the effect size, the overall results state that inexperienced group of players are more immersed than the experienced group of players when measured by RWD factor. Hence it can be concluded that irrespective of the game played, inexperienced players are more dissociated from the real world than the experienced players.

Submitted by Nadir Basilio (nadirsb@uninove.br) on 2018-07-23T18:20:19Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Diogo Henrique Magalhães Gonçalves.pdf: 1521507 bytes, checksum: 0d42f8a3b94345ef905deb7a85a90628 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-23T18:20:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Diogo Henrique Magalhães Gonçalves.pdf: 1521507 bytes, checksum: 0d42f8a3b94345ef905deb7a85a90628 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-12-07 / The reproducibility of scapular kinematics has already been tested intra- and inter-sessions and intra- and inter-days, however, these evaluations were only performed by experienced evaluators and the majority of studies included only one evaluator. Thus, the comparison between evaluators with different levels of experience has not yet been explored, leaving doubts as to the accuracy of the evaluation results when performed by different evaluators. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the reproducibility inter and intra-rater, experienced and inexperienced, during flexion and abduction movements of the arm for the scapula, humerus, and trunk segments. Kinematic data were captured during flexion and abduction movements of the arm using a system of 8 cameras and a sampling frequency of 120 Hz. In total, twenty healthy volunteers were evaluated (10 men and 10 women), with an average age of 25.1 (1.1) years, who underwent 6 sessions of movement analysis. Each evaluator carried out three sessions, two sessions on the first day, with a three-hour interval between them, and the third session on the second day, twenty-four hours after the first day. For each session, 5 repetitions of each movement, unilateral abduction and flexion of the arm, were performed. Statistical analysis was performed by an independent evaluator and the Shapiro-Wilk test was used for data distribution. The reproducibility of the range of motion and angular values at angles of 30º, 60º, 90º, and 120º was verified through the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and standard measurement error (SEM). The values obtained for the angles 30°, 60°, 90°, and 120° intra-day ranged from 0.67-0.98 and (0.58° to 5.64°) for the inexperienced evaluator and from 0.67° to 0.98° and (0.64° to 6.17°) for the experienced evaluator in the flexion movement. During the abduction movement the values obtained at angles of 30°, 60°, 90°, and 120° intra-day ranged from 0.75° to 0.96° and (0.51° to 4.93°) for the inexperienced evaluator and from 0.62° to 0.97° and (0.66° to 6.58°) for the experienced evaluator. The model presented good to excellent intra-day reproducibility for both evaluators in the flexion and abduction movements of the arm. Inter-day values in flexion varied from 0.41° to 0.88° and (0.64° to 6.17°) for the inexperienced evaluator and 0.72° to 0.95° and (0.67° to 4.31°) for the experienced evaluator. In the inter-day abduction movement, values ranged from 0.33° to 0.91° and (0.74° to 6.60°) for the inexperienced evaluator and 0.72° to 0.98° and (0.73° to 5.01°) for the experienced evaluator. The reproducibility of the inexperienced evaluator presented from weak to excellent in the arm flexion movement and poor to excellent in abduction of the arm. The reproducibility for the experienced evaluator was good to excellent for flexion and abduction of the arm between the scapula, humerus, and trunk segments in healthy adults. The results showed that there is no difference between evaluators in the intra-day evaluations; however, on an inter-day basis the experienced evaluator obtained better reproducibility results, demonstrating that a difference in levels of experience between evaluators is of fundamental importance to obtain reproducible results on different days. However, we emphasize the importance of performing further studies, with different movements and patients, performed by two or more evaluators. / A reprodutibilidade da cinemática escapular já foi testada intra e inter-sessões e intra e inter-dias, porém essas avaliações foram realizadas apenas por avaliadores experientes e a maioria dos estudos com apenas um avaliador. A comparação entre avaliadores com diferentes níveis de experiência ainda não foi explorada, deixando dúvidas quanto a precisão dos resultados da avaliação se realizadas por diferentes avaliadores. O objetivo do presente estudo foi avaliar a reprodutibilidade inter e intra-avaliadores, com diferentes níveis de experiência, nos movimentos de flexão e abdução do braço para os segmentos da escápula, úmero e tronco. As capturas dos dados de cinemática foram realizadas utilizando um sistema de 8 câmeras e frequência de amostragem de 120Hz durante os movimentos de flexão e abdução do braço. Foram avaliados 20 voluntários saudáveis (10 homens e 10 mulheres) com idade média de 25.1 (±1.1) anos, que foram submetidos à 6 sessões de análise do movimento. Cada avaliador realizou três sessões, duas sessões realizadas no primeiro dia com intervalo de três horas entre elas e a terceira sessão foi realizada no segundo dia, 48 horas após o primeiro dia. Para cada sessão foram realizadas 5 repetições de cada movimento, abdução e flexão unilateral do braço. A análise estatística foi realizada por um avaliador independente, para distribuição dos dados, foi utilizado o teste de Shapiro-Wilk, A reprodutibilidade da amplitude de movimento e dos valores angulares nos ângulos de 30º, 60º, 90º e 120º do braço foi verificada pelo coeficiente de correlação intraclasse (ICC) assim como o erro de medida padrão (SEM). Os valores obtidos nos ângulos de 30°, 60°, 90° e 120° intra-dia variaram de 0,67-0,98 e (0,58° à 5,64°) para o avaliador inexperiente e variaram de 0,67-0,98 e (0,64° à 6,17°) para o avaliador experiente, no movimento de flexão. Durante o movimento de abdução os valores obtidos nos ângulos de 30°, 60°, 90° e 120° intra-dia variaram de 0,75-0,96 e (0,51° à 4,93°) para o avaliador inexperiente e variaram de 0,62-0,97 e (0,66° à 6,58°) para o avaliador experiente. O modelo apresentou de boa a excelente reprodutibilidade, intra-dia para ambos os avaliadores nos movimentos de flexão e abdução do braço. Os valores obtidos inter-dias na flexão variaram de 0,41 a 0,88 e (0,64° a 6,17) para o avaliador inexperiente e de 0,72 a 0,95 e (0,67° a 4,31°) para o avaliador experiente. No movimento de abdução inter-dias os valores variaram de 0,33 a 0,91 e (0,74° a 6,60°) para o avaliador inexperiente e de 0,72 a 0,98 e (0,73° a 5,01°) para o avaliador experiente. Apresentando a reprodutibilidade do avaliador inexperiente de fraca a excelente no movimento de flexão do braço e pobre a excelente na abdução do braço. A reprodutibilidade para o avaliador experiente foi de boa a excelente para a flexão e abdução do braço entre os segmentos da escápula, úmero e tronco em adultos saudáveis. Mostrando que não há diferença entre avaliadores nas avaliações intra-dia, porém inter-dias o avaliador experiente obteve melhores resultados de reprodutibilidade, mostrando que a diferença de níveis de experiência entre os avaliadores é de fundamental importância para se ter resultados reprodutíveis em diferentes dias. Entretanto devemos ressaltar a importância de mais estudos serem realizados, com diferentes movimentos e pacientes, realizados por dois ou mais avaliadores.