Integrated View at the MTCS Course Organization: The Case of Recursion - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 227

Activity 94: Investigating Research on Learning and Teaching Recursion,
Homework
Table 12.3 presents the homework assignment.
Table 12.3 Homework about computer science education research on learning and
teaching recursion
Worksheet—research on learning and teaching recursion
Look at the list of research papers on learning and teaching recursion that appears at the
bottom of this worksheet.
Choose one paper from the list, read it, and work on the following tasks:
In your opinion, what are the three main messages of the paper?
Indicate three main issues you thought about while reading the paper. You can relate to
what you found most interesting, to what increased your curiosity, to issues you would
like to read more about, or any other idea you thought about.
Mini-research (optional): Choose one of the papers and reconstruct the research
described in the paper.
Paper List
Ford G (1982) A framework for teaching recursion. SIGCSE Bull 14(2):32-39.
Haberman B, Averbuch H (2002). The case of base cases: Why are they so difficult to
recognize? Student difficulties with recursion. ITiCSE 2002, pp 84-88.
Haynes S (1995). Explaining recursion to the unsophisticated. SIGCSE Bull 27(3):3-6
Kahney H (1989) What do novice programmers know about recursion? In: Soloway
E, Spohrer J (eds) Studying the novice programmer, pp 209-228. Lawrence Erlbaum,
Hillsdale
Scholtz T, Sanders I (2010) Mental models of recursion: investigating students' under-
standing of recursion. ITiCSE 2010, Ankara, Turkey
Tessler J, Bradley B, Calvin L (2013) Using cargo-bot to provide contextualized
learning of recursion. Proceedings of the 9th annual international ACM conference on
international computing education research (ICER '13), 12-14 Aug 2013, San Diego,
San California pp 161-168
Wu C, Dale NB, Bethel LJ (1998) Conceptual models and cognitive styles in teaching
recursion. Proceedings of the 30th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science
Education, Atlanta, GA pp 292-296
Activity 95: Recursive Models, Homework and Presentation in the Course
In order to broaden students' teaching toolbox, in this activity they are asked
to find in the computer science education literature models for recursion and
to present them in the class (see Table 12.4 for the homework assignment).
Another option is to organize a poster session in which each student presents
his or her model on a poster.