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Archive / INF Seminars / INF_2024_05_13_Joey_Bevilacqua

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	Assessing the Understanding of Expressions: A Qualitative Study of Notional-Machine-Based Exam Questions

Chair: Marco Paganoni

Thursday

16.05

USI Campus EST, room D1.13, Sector D

16:30 - 17:30


	Joey Bevilacqua

Abstract:
Notional machines are pedagogical devices that assist the understanding of some aspect of programs or programming. We present a qualitative study of the use of a notional machine - ‘expression as tree’ - as an instrument to assess the student’s understanding of expressions. We collect and analyze a corpus of 542 hand-drawn expression tree diagrams from 12 different exams in 6 university programming courses over the course of 4 years. We devise and use a tailored coding approach that admits a wide variety of mistakes, due to the theoretically well-defined programming language constructs that underpin the notional machine. Our results show that even a single question based on the notional machine is able to provide valuable insights into student’s understanding of several key aspects of programming.

Biography:
Joey Bevilacqua is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland, where he is part of the Lugano Computing Education Research Lab (LuCE). He received his Master’s degree in Software and Data Engineering (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland) in June 2023. His current research concentrates on Computer Science Education, with a focus on learning how to program.

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In February 2019, the Software Institute started its SI Seminar Series. Every Thursday afternoon, a researcher of the Institute will publicly give a short talk on a software engineering argument of their choice. Examples include, but are not limited to novel interesting papers, seminal papers, personal research overview, discussion of preliminary research ideas, tutorials, and small experiments.
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