publications
publications by categories in reversed chronological order. generated by jekyll-scholar.
Conference Articles
2024
- Challenges and Approaches to Teaching CS1 in PrisonEmma Hogan , Ruoxuan Li , Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj , and 2 more authorsIn Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 , Mar 2024
Efforts to bring incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals into the field of computing stand to improve equitable access to both computing jobs, and consequently the benefits of our tools and innovations through the inclusion of more diverse perspec- tives. This report describes the design and execution of a college level introductory computing course conducted with 26 students currently incarcerated at a prison in the United States in Fall 2022. We discuss the ways that the prison environment and the student body differ from traditional college computing classes, and how this impacted the design and execution of the course. We found that despite significant environmental barriers to learning to program, such as not having access to a code interpreter, there were unique affordances of the student population, including maturity and community, that could be leveraged in the course design and policies. We conclude with many lessons learned for the purpose of improving future offerings of computing courses in prisons.
2023
- CS0 vs. CS1:: Understanding Fears and Confidence amongst Non-majors in Introductory CS CoursesEmma Hogan , Ruoxuan Li , and Adalbert Gerald Soosai RajIn Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 , Mar 2023
Previous research has been devoted to improving the experience of non-majors in introductory CS courses. In this study, we compare the experiences of non-majors in two different introductory CS courses, specifically with respect to fears about taking the course and change in confidence levels. CS0 is a computing course intentionally designed for non-majors, and CS1 is a more traditional introductory computing course. Both of these courses were composed primarily of non-majors and were taught by the same instructor. Survey data was collected from 124 students enrolled in CS0, and 502 students enrolled in CS1. Through qualitative analysis, we found that the fears of non-major students entering both of these introductory CS courses fell into one or more of nine distinct categories (e.g., Coding, Perceiving STEM as Difficult, Managing Workload). Additionally, using students’ confidence levels at the beginning and end of the courses, we found that students in CS0 had a greater increase in confidence level than those in CS1. Finally, we explored connections between students’ fears and how their confidence changed by the end of the course. We found that students across both courses with fears related to coding, lack of preparation, and being left behind had the highest average increase in confidence levels.
- An Empirical Evaluation of Live Coding in CS1Anshul Shah , Emma Hogan , Vardhan Agarwal , and 4 more authorsIn Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1 , Aug 2023
Background and Context. Live coding is a teaching method in which an instructor dynamically writes code in front of students in an effort to impart skills such as incremental development and debugging. By contrast, traditional, static-code examples typically involve an instructor annotating or explaining components of pre-written code. Despite recommendations to use live coding and a wealth of qualitative analyses that identify perceived learning benefits of it, there are a lack of empirical evaluations to confirm those learning benefits, especially with respect to students’ programming processes. Objectives. Our work aims to provide a holistic, empirical comparison of a live-coding pedagogy with a static-code one. We evaluated the impact of a live-coding pedagogy on three main areas: 1) students’ adherence to effective programming processes, 2) their performance on exams and assignments, and 3) their lecture experiences, such as engagement during lecture and perceptions of code examples. Method. In our treatment-control quasi-experimental setup, one lecture group saw live-coding examples while the other saw only static-code ones. Both lecture groups were taught by the same instructor, were taught the exact same content, and completed the same assignments and exams. We collected compilation-level programming process data, student performance on exam and homework questions, and feedback via a survey and course evaluations. Findings. Our findings showed no statistically significant differences between the live-coding and static-code groups on programming process metrics related to incremental development, debugging, and productivity. Similarly, there was no difference between the groups on course performance on assignments and exams. Finally, student feedback suggests that more students in the live-coding group reported that lectures were too fast and failed to facilitate note-taking, potentially mitigating the perceived benefits of live coding. Implications. Live coding alone may not lead to many of the perceived and intended benefits that prior work identifies, but future work may investigate how to realize these benefits while minimizing the drawbacks we identified.
- The Impact of a Remote Live-Coding Pedagogy on Student Programming Processes, Grades, and Lecture Questions AskedAnshul Shah , Vardhan Agarwal , Michael Granado , and 5 more authorsIn Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 , Jun 2023
Live coding—a pedagogical technique in which an instructor plans, writes, and executes code in front of a class—is generally considered a best practice when teaching programming. However, only a few studies have evaluated the effect of live coding on student learning in a controlled experiment and most of the literature relating to live coding identifies students’ perceived benefits of live-coding examples. In order to empirically evaluate the impact of live coding, we designed a controlled experiment in a CS1 course taught in Python at a large public university. In the two remote lecture sections for the course, one was taught using live-coding examples and the other was taught using static-code examples. Throughout the term, we collected code snapshots from students’ programming assignments, students’ grades, and the questions that they asked during the remote lectures. We then applied a set of process-oriented programming metrics to students’ programming data to compare students’ adherence to effective programming processes in the two learning groups and categorized each question asked in lectures following an open-coding approach. Our results revealed a general lack of difference between the two groups across programming processes, grades, and lecture questions asked. However, our experiment uncovered minimal effects in favor of the live-coding group indicating improved programming processes but lower performance on assignments and grades. Our results suggest an overall insignificant impact of the style of presenting code examples, though we reflect on the threats to validity in our study that should be addressed in future work.
- Engagement and Anonymity in Online Computer Science Course ForumsMrinal Sharma , Hayden McTavish , Zimo Peng , and 7 more authorsIn Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1 , Aug 2023
Online discussion boards, designed to facilitate learning from peers and instructors in an accessible space, are a vital part of course design, especially in large scale computer science classes. Previous work has shown that women in computer science tend to use anonymity more often than men on these boards, a trend not found in humanities, social science or business courses. In this work, we build on these findings using an intersectional lens, analyzing both gender and race/ethnicity. We find this combined analysis reveals differences in anonymity that are not apparent when examining gender alone. For example, we find a significantly greater difference in anonymity use between Hispanic men and women than would be expected from analyzing race/ethnicity and gender independently. We additionally analyze type of content (e.g., questions, answers), course, platform, and data source to characterize the many factors at play in measuring students’ choice to participate anonymously. In doing so, we show that different approaches used in prior work for eliciting information on gender — whether using registrar data, a survey, or imputing gender based on name — changes how over 20% of students are classified, particularly affecting nonbinary students and Asian students. Understanding when students participate anonymously can help educators and platform designers to make students’ experience of online discussion boards more welcoming.
Theses
2021
- The Role of Technology in Supporting the Learning Needs of All Levels of Incarcerated Students: A Supplement, not a ReplacementEmma HoganAug 2021
This research contributes to answering this question of how to improve correctional education by defining the role of technology in its ideal implementation, in order to maximize the impact of education for as many incarcerated learners as possible. In Part I, I detail the survey conducted in Albany County Jail to support this research with the primary source of perspectives from currently incarcerated learners. From that point forward, first-hand accounts from these individuals are spread throughout the paper (indicated with italics and block quotes at the beginnings of sections to which they apply) in order to situate all of the points I make within the context of the lives this work intends to serve. Part II focuses on current policy related to correctional education, grounding my arguments in the reality of what the law does and does not require and how this dictates the current state of education in prisons and jails. In Part III, I identify the specific learning needs of the incarcerated population. Part IV assesses how the current state of correctional education fails to meet these needs, and particularly the limitations of technology in its current implementation. My research culminates in Part V with recommendations on the role technology should have in the future of correctional education.
news
2021
- OPINION: Washington’s DOC Is Trapping Incarcerated Men in Solitary ConfinementEmma Hogan , and Hannah BolotinJul 2021
- Locked out of life-saving education programsEmma Hogan , and Hannah BolotinJul 2021
Front facing, on their letterhead and websites, the Washington State Department of Corrections and legislature verbalize what they believe the voting public wants to read and hear. However, behind closed doors, in caucus, in action, in reality, they are locking prisoners out of educational
preprint
2022
- Observations From an Online Security Competition and Its Implications on Crowdsourced SecurityAlejandro Cuevas , Emma Hogan , Hanan Hibshi , and 1 more authorApr 2022arXiv:2204.12601 [cs]
The crowd sourced security industry, particularly bug bounty programs, has grown dramatically over the past years and has become the main source of software security reviews for many companies. However, the academic literature has largely omitted security teams, particularly in crowd work contexts. As such, we know very little about how distributed security teams organize, collaborate, and what technology needs they have. We fill this gap by conducting focus groups with the top five teams (out of 18,201 participating teams) of a computer security Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competition. We find that these teams adopted a set of strategies centered on specialties, which allowed them to reduce issues relating to dispersion, double work, and lack of previous collaboration. Observing the current issues of a model centered on individual workers in security crowd work platforms, our study cases that scaling security work to teams is feasible and beneficial. Finally, we identify various areas which warrant future work, such as issues of social identity in high-skilled crowd work environments.
presentation
2024
- Uncovering Meaningful Computing Contexts for Incarcerated College StudentsEmma HoganJan 2024
Higher education is expanding in United States prisons, with a growing demand for STEM offerings. Academics from other disciplines have stressed the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in prison higher education, and computing in context has shown major benefits in CS1— especially for women and nontraditional students. More work is needed to determine what contexts are relevant to incarcerated college students, and how to incorporate these into computing curricula. In this paper, we build on prior work on computing in context and culturally relevant techniques in computing. We analyze course data from a CS1 course taught in a college-in-prison program to answer the following research question: What contexts do incarcerated students in CS1 find relevant? We identify 24 topics pursued by students across 78 open-ended programming assignment submissions, the three most popular being business management, sports statistics, and physical health. These results offer insight into potential contexts that are meaningful to incarcerated college students to be incorporated into future computing curricula and interventions in prisons.
2023
- Challenges and Approaches to Teaching Computing in PrisonEmma HoganNov 2023
Computer science (CS), and STEM fields in general, historically exclude people from underserved communities, who are overrepresented in the prison population. In higher education programs in prison, offerings of STEM courses are often limited, posing unique challenges to providing the same educational quality as found on traditional college campuses. For CS courses, technology infrastructure and policies make it difficult for instructors to make essential tools – such as code interpreters where students can run code – available to students. This puts students in computing courses at an undeniable disadvantage, as so much of the learning process of writing code is by doing: running code, understanding the output, and adjusting based on any errors. While students do not have access to technological tools and software needed for their education, instructors will have difficulty closing the gap between incarcerated and non-incarcerated students’ success. During this talk, I will share my experience as a CS instructor in prison, and discuss the barriers to learning computing in prison settings. I will also discuss practical solutions I have found to be effective, as well as ideas I have planned for future iterations of this course.
- CS0 vs. CS1: Understanding Fears and Confidence amongst Non-majors in Introductory CS CoursesEmma HoganMar 2023
Previous research has been devoted to improving the experience of non-majors in introductory CS courses. In this study, we compare the experiences of non-majors in two different introductory CS courses, specifically with respect to fears about taking the course and change in confidence levels. CS0 is a computing course intentionally designed for non-majors, and CS1 is a more traditional introductory computing course. Both of these courses were composed primarily of non-majors and were taught by the same instructor. Survey data was collected from 124 students enrolled in CS0, and 502 students enrolled in CS1. Through qualitative analysis, we found that the fears of non-major students entering both of these introductory CS courses fell into one or more of nine distinct categories (e.g., Coding, Perceiving STEM as Difficult, Managing Workload). Additionally, using students’ confidence levels at the beginning and end of the courses, we found that students in CS0 had a greater increase in confidence level than those in CS1. Finally, we explored connections between students’ fears and how their confidence changed by the end of the course. We found that students across both courses with fears related to coding, lack of preparation, and being left behind had the highest average increase in confidence levels.
2021
- Thrown Away in Our Prison System: How Poor People of Color with Mental Illness are OstracizedEmma Hogan , Kevin Allen , and Ari KohnOct 2021