Daryl D Souza

Work place: Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

E-mail: daryl.dsouza@rmit.edu.au

Website:

Research Interests: Applied computer science, Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Multimedia Information System, Theoretical Computer Science

Biography

Dr. Daryl D'Souza has been an academic member of the School of Computer Science & IT, RMIT University, Melbourne, since 1983, and has contributed substantially to all facets of university life, including teaching, research, leadership and community engagement. He holds a PhD (2005) in Computer Science, in information retrieval. He has extensive teaching experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate coursework levels and is presently largely involved in first year teaching of programming. This latter activity is an important part of his reflective teaching practice and scholarly activity in the area of computing education research and since has added computing education research to his research interests, which include learning analytics. He has published in computing education research since 2011, has chaired national computing education conferences, and has been an investigator in several research grants to investigate curriculum and pedagogy issues around novice programming.

Author Articles
The Impact of Lecture Attendance on Exams for Novice Programming Students

By Ashok Kumar Veerasamy Daryl D Souza Rolf Linden Erkki Kaila Mikko-Jussi Laakso Tapio Salakoski

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.05.01, Pub. Date: 8 May 2016

In this paper, the correlation between lecture attendance and assessment tasks on final exam performance of introductory programming students has been analyzed to identify if lecture attendance, and completion of in-class and take home formative assessment tasks affects student performance in the final examination. In this study, only lecture attendance, homework exercises and class demonstration scores, and final exam marks have been considered. This study used Spearman’s Rank correlation coefficient and multiple regression techniques via SPSS software to analyze the student data of the academic years 2012, 2013 and 2014 of an introductory programming course to test the hypotheses. It is found that, there is a significant correlation between homework exercises and final exam scores. However, formal lecture attendance and final exam performance were negatively correlated. Moreover, multiple regression results of assessment tasks such as homework exercises, class activities and lecture attendance on final exam scores, did not provide any significant value to support the statement “Marks achieved in homework, class demonstrations, and lecture attendance, have a significant positive impact on final examination results”.

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