Today we are faced with a shortage of qualified candidates for the growing computer science occupations that are among the fastest growing fields in our nation. A current shortage of students in the educational pipeline coupled with a lack of diversity in the field is impacting our technological growth and expansion. It has been suggested that it…

Today, most young people in the United States (U.S.) live technology-saturated lives. Their educational, entertainment, and career options originate from and demand incredible technological innovations. However, this extensive ownership of and access to technology does not indicate that today's youth know how technology works or how to control and…

The world, and especially our own country, is in dire need of a larger and more diverse population of computer scientists. While many organizations have approached this problem of too few computer scientists in various ways, a promising, and I believe necessary, path is to expose elementary students to authentic practices of the discipline.…

The purpose of this action research study was to measure the transactional distance of computer science students who participated in an online virtual community after completing a college preparation program. Using data and results generated from previous cycles of research I developed and moderated an online virtual community designed to lessen…

The lack of diversity in the technology workforce in the United States has proven to be a stubborn problem, resisting even the most well-funded reform efforts. With the absence of computer science education in the mainstream K-12 curriculum, only a narrow band of students in public schools go on to careers in technology. The problem persists…

Some low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) aim to designate the information and communication technology (ICT) sector as a central pillar to expedite their economic development, and a key element of ICT sector development is to nurture capable ICT workers. Scholars and policymakers concerned with those ICT workers tend to focus on nurturing…

An inconsistent database is a database that violates one or more of its integrity constraints. In reality, violations of integrity constraints arise frequently under several different circumstances. Inconsistent databases have long posed the challenge to develop suitable tools for meaningful query answering. A principled approach for querying…

This dissertation is a mixed-methods ethnographic study of students in the introductory class in the Engineering & Computer Science (ECS) department at University of California, Davis (UC Davis). I collected audio-recorded natural speech and questionnaire data from students attending this course during two academic quarters, Fall 2016 and…

The Digital Agenda for Europe (2015) states that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for Information and Communications Technology by 2020. This lack of IT professionals stems from the small number of students graduating in computer science. To retain more students in the field, teachers can use remote robotic experiments to explain difficult…

The primary purpose of this study was to identify secondary computer science (CS) teachers' needs, related to knowledge, skills, and school setting, to create more effective CS education in the United States. In addition, this study examined how these needs change based on the participants' years of teaching experience as well as their background…

Piaget's classic work on cognitive development showed that engaging learners in critical discussions with peers about ideas that are "different" than theirs leads to deep conceptual understanding. Implementing such an approach in college-level STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) courses has some specific challenges: (a) Short…

In their studies on student motivation in the 1990s, Gorham & Christophel and Christophel & Gorham found that students perceived their own demotivation to be caused by instructor behaviors. While there are studies that explore the topic of student demotivation and other studies that illustrate the great influence instructors have on…

Location technologies constitute an essential component of systems design for autonomous operations and control. The Global Positioning System (GPS) works well in outdoor areas, but the satellite signals are not strong enough to penetrate inside most indoor environments. As a result, a new strain of indoor positioning technologies that make use of…

Within the confines of this study, the researcher investigated Project Lead the Way (PLTW) Engineering curriculum goals within Missouri high schools. The study measured Missouri PLTW teachers' perceptions of various elements of the curriculum as well as state and national PLTW End of Course student assessment data to determine if a relationship…

Effective software testing identifies potential bugs and helps correct them, producing more reliable and maintainable software. As software development processes have evolved, incremental testing techniques have grown in popularity, particularly with introduction of test-driven development (TDD). However, many programmers struggle to adopt TDD's…