Types of Questions in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 159

This teacher's role should be delivered to the prospective CS teachers, and there-
fore, it is recommended to use/mention/practice a variety of different types of ques-
tions throughout the Methods of Teaching Computer Science (MTCS) course in
different opportunities and contexts. Clearly, instructors of the MTCS course should
also apply the same pedagogical principles and vary the types of tasks and questions
they use while discussing the teaching of CS with the prospective CS teachers.
One of the common problem-solving scenarios in CS education starts with the
presentation of an open problem that describes some story, continues with the prob-
lem analysis and planning of its solution, and ends with the presentation of the
solution as an algorithm either in pseudocode or a specific programming language.
It is important, however, that CS teachers be aware of the fact that additional types
of questions exist.
Several pedagogical targets can be achieved by the integration of different types
of questions in the teaching of CS, as is laid out in what follows:
1. Different types of questions enable to illuminate different aspects of the learned
content.
2. The integration of different types of questions throughout the teaching process
helps maintain the students' interest, attention, and curiosity.
3. Different types of questions enable teachers to vary their teaching tools.
4. Different types of questions require the students to use different cognitive
skills—mental abilities we use while thinking, learning, and studying. This tar-
get is important to enable each learner express his or her unique individual cog-
nitive skills, to articulate his or her knowledge in his or her unique way, and to
develop and enrich one's cognitive skills.
Cognition is the process of thought and it can be analyzed from different perspec-
tives. For example, in psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely
related to abstract concepts, such as mind, reasoning, perception, intelligence, and
learning, all of which describe the mind capabilities. The field of cognition stud-
ies specifies mental processes, such as comprehension, inference, decision making,
planning, and learning. With respect to CS, we are all familiar with the advanced
cognitive skills of abstraction, generalization, concretization, and meta-reasoning.
Research works in CS education deal with different types of questions from the
cognitive perspective. For example, Thompson et al. ( 2008 ) reviewed the work that
has been done throughout the last 10 years with respect to the application of Bloom's
taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956 ) to CS course design, evaluation, and assessments,
and provided an interpretation of the taxonomy that can be applied to introductory
programming exams. Their interpretation focuses on the cognitive skill involved in
addressing several types of questions. Jones et al. ( 2009 ) focus on written examina-
tions. They determine the difficulty level of each question by keyword/s found in
the question, and present cross-analysis that addresses student performance, cogni-
tive skills, and learning outcomes. Other kind of works that combine CS questions
and cognition relates to automata systems of question-answering processes (see,
e.g., Pomerantz 2002 ; Yang et al. 2008 ).