Exploring Students' Understanding of Concurrency - A Phenomenographic Study
Pages 940 - 946
Abstract
This paper continues previous efforts in understanding the problems students face when learning concurrency. In this paper, we explore students' understanding of the subject using phenomenography in order to gain insights that can aid in explaining the underlying causes for common student mistakes in concurrency, which has been studied in depth previously. Students' experience of concurrency and critical sections were analyzed using a phenomenographic study based on interviews with students attending one of two courses on concurrency and operating systems. We present 6 categories describing students' experience of concurrency, and 4 categories describing students' experience of critical sections in this paper. Furthermore, these categories are related to previous results, both to explore how misconceptions in the categores relate to student mistakes and to estimate how common it is for each category to be discerned.
References
[1]
Mordechai Ben-Ari and Yifat Ben-David Kolikant. 1999. Thinking Parallel: The Process of Learning Concurrency. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual SIGCSE/SIGCUE ITiCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '99). ACM, 13--16. https://doi.org/10.1145/305786.305831
[2]
Anders Berglund. 2006. Phenomenography as a way to research learning in computing. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology, Vol. 4, 1 (2006). http://www.citrenz.ac.nz/bacit/0401/2006Berglund_Phenomenography.htm
[3]
Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. 1989. Linda in Context. Commun. ACM, Vol. 32, 4 (April 1989), 444--458. https://doi.org/10.1145/63334.63337
[4]
Bernard Doyle and Raymond Lister. 2007. Why Teach Unix?. In Proceedings of the Ninth Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 66 (ACE '07). Australian Computer Society, Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, Australia, 19--25.
[5]
Yifat Ben-David Kolikant. 2004 a. Learning Concurrency as an Entry Point to the Community of Computer Science Practitioners. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, Vol. 23, 1 (2004), 21--46.
[6]
Yifat Ben-David Kolikant. 2004 b. Learning concurrency: evolution of students' understanding of synchronization. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 60, 2 (2004), 243--268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.10.005
[7]
Yifat Ben-David Kolikant. 2005. Students' Alternative Standards for Correctness. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER '05). ACM, 37--43. https://doi.org/10.1145/1089786.1089790
[8]
Sirong Lin and Deborah Tatar. 2011. Encouraging Parallel Thinking Through Explicit Coordination Modeling. In Proceedings of the 42Nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '11). ACM, 441--446. https://doi.org/10.1145/1953163.1953292
[9]
Jan Lönnberg. 2006. Student Errors in Concurrent Programming Assignments. In Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research: Koli Calling 2006 (Baltic Sea '06). ACM, 145--146. https://doi.org/10.1145/1315803.1315833
[10]
Jan Lönnberg, Anders Berglund, and Lauri Malmi. 2009. How Students Develop Concurrent Programs. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 95 (ACE '09). Australian Computer Society, Inc., 129--138. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1862712.1862732
[11]
Jan Lönnberg and Anders Berglund. 2007. Students' Understandings of Concurrent Programming. In Proceedings of the Seventh Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research - Volume 88 (Koli Calling '07). Australian Computer Society, Inc., 77--86. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2449323.2449332
[12]
Ference Marton. 2014. Necessary Conditions of Learning .Routledge.
[13]
Ference Marton and Shirley Booth. 1997. Learning and Awareness .Routledge.
[14]
Jan Erik Moström. 2011. Learning concurrency - What's the problem? In A study of student problems in learning to program. Umeå, Sweden, Chapter VII. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-48216
[15]
Mitchel Resnick. 1990. MultiLogo: A Study of Children and Concurrent Programming. Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 1, 3 (1990), 153--170. https://doi.org/10.1080/104948290010301
[16]
Filip Strömback, Linda Mannila, Mikael Asplund, and Mariam Kamkar. 2019. A Student's View of Concurrency - A Study of Common Mistakes in Introductory Courses on Concurrency. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER '19). ACM, 229--237. https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3339415
Index Terms
- Exploring Students' Understanding of Concurrency - A Phenomenographic Study
Recommendations
Students’ Experience of Participation in a Discipline—A Longitudinal Study of Computer Science and IT Engineering Students
This article concludes a longitudinal study with the broader aim to explore learner development as a long-term, social process. One goal has been to inform the endeavours of improving student engagement, retention, as well as under-representation of ...
Designing Engineering Curricula Based on Phenomenographic Results: Relating Theory to Practice
T4E '14: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Technology for EducationEngineering education research generates many insightful findings on learning and teaching of engineering concepts. These research findings need to be translated into practical implementations in the classroom to help students to achieve better learning ...
Students' Views of Concurrency and Synchronization
Koli Calling '19: Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education ResearchThis extended abstract describes our ongoing effort to support students' learning and understanding of concurrency and synchronization. We have identified and quantified some of the areas that appear to be problematic to students, and are in the process ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
February 2020
1502 pages
ISBN:9781450367936
DOI:10.1145/3328778
- General Chairs:
- Jian Zhang,
- Mark Sherriff,
- Program Chairs:
- Sarah Heckman,
- Pamela Cutter,
- Alvaro Monge
Copyright © 2020 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 26 February 2020
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
SIGCSE '20
Sponsor:
SIGCSE '20: The 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
March 11 - 14, 2020
OR, Portland, USA
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%
Upcoming Conference
SIGCSE TS 2025
- Sponsor:
- sigcse
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 166Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)12
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 01 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View allView Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in