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The paper-and-pencil programming strategy (PPS) is a way of representing an idea logically by any representation that can be created using paper and pencil. It was developed for non-computer majors to improve their understanding and use of computational thinking and increase interest in learning computer science. A total of 110 non-majors in their sophomore year were assigned to either a Logo or a PPS course with attendance being 2 hours per week for 15 weeks. To measure the effectiveness of PPS, the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking and a self-assessment survey pre- and post-test were used. Findings indicated that PPS not only improved students' overall logical thinking as much as did Logo programming learning, but also increased scores on one more subscale of logical thinking than did the Logo course. In addition, PPS significantly helped students understand the concept of computational thinking and increased their interest in learning computer science.

Context: The retraction of research papers, for whatever reason, is a growing phenomenon. However, although retracted paper information is publicly available via publishers, it is somewhat distributed and inconsistent. Objective: The aim is to assess: (i) the extent and nature of retracted research in Computer Science (CS) (ii) the post-retraction citation behaviour of retracted works and (iii) the potential impact upon systematic reviews and mapping studies. Method: We analyse the Retraction Watch database and take citation information from the Web of Science and Google scholar. Results: We find that of the 33,955 entries in the Retraction watch database (16 May 2022), 2,816 are classified as CS, i.e., ≈ 8%. For CS, 56% of retracted papers provide little or no information as to the reasons. This contrasts with 26% for other disciplines. There is also some disparity between different publishers, a tendency for multiple versions of a retracted paper to be available beyond the Version of Record (VoR), and for new citations long after a paper is officially retracted (median = 3; maximum = 18). Systematic reviews are also impacted with ≈ 30% of the retracted papers having one or more citations from a review. Conclusions: Unfortunately, retraction seems to be a sufficiently common outcome for a scientific paper that we as a research community need to take it more seriously, e.g., standardising procedures and taxonomies across publishers and the provision of appropriate research tools. Finally, we recommend particular caution when undertaking secondary analyses and meta-analyses which are at risk of becoming contaminated by these problem primary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflective practice is an essential catalyst through which the benefits of teaching and learning can be reaped. Through it, weaknesses and strengths can be identified in a way that helps raise the level of addressing challenges that may arise as well as overcome them. This paper presents the critical reflective practices among computer science secondary school teachers from their point of view in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. To this extent, the study aims to determine the degree of critical reflective practices among computer science secondary school teachers in Riyadh from their perspective. The paper also seeks to investigate the effects of variables such as gender, qualifications and experience on the perceptions of the aforementioned teachers, towards the critical reflective practices among computer science secondary school teachers. The study tool is a questionnaire which consisted of two dimensions and was distributed to a population of 739 participants. From this, the study sample comprised (223) computer science teachers working in secondary school in Riyadh. The findings revealed that there is no significant difference in the estimation degree concerning the critical reflective practices due to the gender. From the results, it was also established that there is no significant difference in the degree of estimation in relation to the critical reflective practices due to educational qualification variables. On the contrary however, there is a significant difference in the degree of estimation in regard to the critical reflective practices due to the years of experience variable. These differences were evident in a group of those with more than 10 years of experience. The other findings produced by the study highlight that the participants are in agreement about the importance of critical reflective practices. The degree of reflective practice, which is from the participants' point of view, is considered to be of a high value. The majority of the subjects opted to agree with the practice of reflection after a training session. It was determined from the results that some of the most common strategies favored by practitioners involved the communal practice of mind reflection with individuals from outside the school.

Driving research questions from the prevailing issues and interests and developing from them new theories, formulas, algorithms, methods, and designs, and linking them to the interests of the larger audience is a vital component of scientific research papers. The present article discusses outlining purposes or stating the nature of the present research, and listing research questions or hypotheses in the introduction of academic papers. This corpus-based genre study focuses particularly on Move 3 of the model "occupying the niche." The results indicating disciplinary variation show that the writers of Computer Science (CS) research articles, over the years have developed an increased use of outlining purpose/stating the nature of the present research, having the characteristics of purposive, descriptive, extension of the previous work, contrast to the existing work, brevity, complexity, and a description of methodology. It also shows that listing research questions or hypothesis may have distinctively different functions in developing genres as compared to the established ones such as physics.

This paper aims to investigate the differences between conference papers and journal papers in the field of computer science based on Bayesian network. This paper investigated the differences between conference papers and journal papers in the field of computer science based on Bayesian network, a knowledge-representative framework that can model relationships among all variables in the network. We defined the variables required for Bayesian networks modeling, calculated the values of each variable based Aminer dataset (a literature data set in the field of computer science), learned the Bayesian network and derived some findings based on network inference. The study found that conferences are more attractive to senior scholars, the academic impact of conference papers is slightly higher than journal papers, and it is uncertain whether conference papers are more innovative than journal papers. The study was limited to the field of computer science and employed Aminer dataset as the sample. Further studies involving more diverse datasets and different fields could provide a more complete picture of the matter. By demonstrating that Bayesian networks can effectively analyze issues in Scientometrics, the study offers valuable insights that may enhance researchers' understanding of the differences between journal and conference in computer science. Academic conferences play a crucial role in facilitating scholarly exchange and knowledge dissemination within the field of computer science. Several studies have been conducted to examine the distinctions between conference papers and journal papers in terms of various factors, such as authors, citations, h-index and others. Those studies were carried out from different (independent) perspectives, lacking a systematic examination of the connections and interactions between multiple perspectives. This paper supplements this deficiency based on Bayesian network modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we test the hypothesis that computer science papers asking questions (i.e., those with a question mark at the end of their title) are cited more frequently than those that do not have this property. To this end, we analyze a data set of almost two million records on computer science papers indexed in the Web of Science database and focus our investigation on the mean number of citations per paper of its specific subsets. The main finding is that the average number of citations per paper of the so-called “asking papers” is greater by almost 20% than that of other papers, and that this difference is statistically significant.

This small scale study aims to analyze the question papers of Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in the subject of computer science with reference to item analysis and Bloom's taxonomy. Data were collected from 100 students of Grade 9th and 10th from the schools of Lahore city using convenient sampling technique. Data collected on the papers developed by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education for the year of 2015 and 2016. Item analyses were performed using Conquest software. Findings of the study shows that in the question papers conducted by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education the majority questions were measuring the student abilities of knowledge and comprehension and only few questions were given to measure the student abilities to analyze, synthesize and evaluate, and this can be very helpful for the policy makers. Result of item analysis shows that many questions were not in the acceptable range of item difficulty and item discrimination. Items in the question papers were either too easy or too difficult. Findings revealed that the papers conducted and administered by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education were not up to the mark, with reference to Bloom's taxonomy. The researcher recommended to train the assessment committee/panel developing the items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-evaluating scientific paper quality aids in alleviating peer review pressure and fostering scientific advancement. Although prior studies have identified numerous quality-related features, their effectiveness and representativeness of paper content remain to be comprehensively investigated. Addressing this issue, we propose a content-based interpretable method for pre-evaluating the quality of scientific papers. Firstly, we define quality attributes of computer science (CS) papers as integrity , clarity , novelty , and significance , based on peer review criteria from 11 top-tier CS conferences. We formulate the problem as two classification tasks: Accepted/Disputed/Rejected (ADR) and Accepted/Rejected (AR). Subsequently, we construct fine-grained features from metadata and knowledge entity networks, including text structure, readability, references, citations, semantic novelty, and network structure. We empirically evaluate our method using the ICLR paper dataset, achieving optimal performance with the Random Forest model, yielding F1 scores of 0.715 and 0.762 for the two tasks, respectively. Through feature analysis and case studies employing SHAP interpretable methods, we demonstrate that the proposed features enhance the performance of machine learning models in scientific paper quality evaluation, offering interpretable evidence for model decisions. • Define four criteria for quality evaluation of scientific papers: integrity, clarity, novelty, and significance. • Propose a framework for quality evaluation of scientific papers based on coarse features and knowledge entity network. • An effective algorithm for measuring the novelty and significance of scientific papers based on knowledge entity networks. • Create and release a rigorous dataset, which could serve as the gold standard for quality evaluation of scientific papers. • Conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction functions as a showcase in research articles (RAs). It motivates the reader to read the rest of the paper. However, writing a well-crafted introduction is a complex task, mainly when the writer generates the manuscript in another language. This study investigated the rhetorical differences/similarities employed in the introductions of RAs published in Iranian and international ISI journals in Computer Sciences (CS) using Swales (2004) CARS model. Two sets of CS RAs (30 each) were randomly selected. Frequency and non-parametric tests were used to examine the differences between the two groups of introductions. The results indicated that M 1 S 1 (Generalizing the topic), M2 1A (Indicating the gap), M3 S1 (Describing the research), M3 S4 (Methods Summary), and M 3 S 6 (Stating research advantages) were used with high frequencies. M 2 S 2 (Announcing positive justification) was absent, and the others were in low preferences. Also, the Analysis illustrated a statistically significant variation between the introductions concerning the use of M3S7 (Demarcating the Research Organization). Findings support genre-based pedagogy in scientific writing classes to make the graduate CS students aware of these rhetorical structures conventional to introductions in CS RAs.

Purpose: The number of citations has been widely used to measure the significance of a paper. However, there is a need in introducing another index to determine superiority or inferiority of papers with the same number of citations. We determine superiority or inferiority of papers by using the ranking based on the number of citations and PageRank. Design/methodology/approach: We show the positive linear correlation between Citation Rank (the ranking of the number of citation) and PageRank. On this basis, we identify high-quality, prestige, emerging, and popular papers. Findings: We found that the high-quality papers belong to the subjects of biochemistry and molecular biology, chemistry, and multidisciplinary sciences. The prestige papers correspond to the subjects of computer science, engineering, and information science. The emerging papers are related to biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as those published in the journal "Cell." The popular papers belong to the subject of multidisciplinary sciences. Research limitations: We analyze the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) from 1981 to 2015 to calculate Citation Rank and PageRank within a citation network consisting of 34,666,719 papers and 591,321,826 citations. Practical implications: Our method is applicable to forecast emerging fields of research subjects in science and helps policymakers to consider science policy. Originality/value: We calculated PageRank for a giant citation network which is extremely larger than the citation networks investigated by previous researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we continue describing the project and the experimentation of "Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali" (ROAR; in English, Real Applications of Operations Research), a three-year project for higher secondary schools, introduced. ROAR is composed of three teaching units, addressed to Grades 10, 11, and 12, respectively, having the main aim to improve students' interest, motivation, and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines by integrating mathematics and computer science through operations research. In a previous paper, we reported on the design and implementation of the first unit, started in Spring 2021 at the scientific high school IIS Antonietti in Iseo (Brescia, Italy), in a Grade-10 class. Here, we focus on the second unit, carried out in Winter/Spring 2022 with the same students, now in a Grade-11 class. In particular, we describe objectives, prerequisites, topics and methods, the organization of the lectures, digital technologies used, and a challenging final project. Moreover, we analyze the feedback from students and teachers involved in the experimentation.

In our post-pandemic world, where the majority of higher education institutions have transitioned back to in-person classes, this paper argues that we must not return to pre-COVID teaching practices. Instead, we have the obligation and opportunity to create an educational experience and environment that better facilitates learning and instruction. This paper presents post-COVID best practices for employing technology in higher education based on an original survey and follow-up interviews of seventeen computing instructors at our institution. After a literature review, we describe four general categories of practices that enhance the post-COVID classroom: online student activities, digital instructor notes, remote classroom participation and collaboration, and a paperless classroom. For each of these categories, we provide vignettes to illustrate scope and intent. We also offer recommendations for addressing digital dishonesty, required infrastructure, institutional support, and being prepared to seamlessly return to a blended or fully remote environment in the event of another crisis. Finally, we identify additional emerging technological challenges and opportunities that require further effort. Overall, this paper emphasizes the need for a shift towards improved practices in the classroom rather than just a return to pre-pandemic norms. We believe implementing these recommendations will result in a more flexible, accessible, and robust post-COVID educational experience.

The 33rd International Workshop On Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2022) was held at the University of Trier in Germany. This workshop covers a wide range of topics related to combinatorial algorithms. The special issue of the journal Algorithmica contains extended versions of selected papers from IWOCA 2022, which were nominated by the Program Committee and underwent a rigorous reviewing process. The special issue includes nine papers on various topics such as perfect matchings, algorithmic questions, and winner determination algorithms. One paper was chosen as the Best Paper of IWOCA 2022 and another as the Best Student Paper. The special issue is recommended for readers interested in exploring more papers from IWOCA 2022. [Extracted from the article]

Over 60 years of technology development, transformation of educational policy and curriculum innovation in Ireland have resulted in the introduction of the Computer Science (CS) subject in Post-Primary (PP) Education. CS has always been conceived digitally and the Digital Learning Experiences (DLE) enacted through its curriculum are strongly interconnected to the opportunities and limitations offered by Digital Spaces (DS). However, key challenges have been identified for the successful implementation of CSE, from teachers' digital competencies and educational strategies in the classroom to learners' varying experiences of CSE. Through a systematic literature review of the educational policies and practices in Ireland's Educational System, this paper documents the digital evolution from the 1960s accounting for the CS curriculum. The literature review identifies key themes in how DS have been conceptualised through CSE, responding to learners' needs and teachers' skills and competencies, informed by emerging societal demands by providing evidence on the disparity between educational policy and practice for DS. Building upon the identified themes, this paper emphasises the importance of the design and implementation of DLE in DS such as the CS subject that considers historical lessons learned to respond to the uncertainties of the digital future.

The International Institute of Knowledge Innovation and Invention (IIKII) is an institute that promotes the exchange of innovations and inventions, and establishes a communication platform for international innovations and researches. In 2019, IIKII cooperated with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Tainan Section Sensors Council to hold IEEE conferences such as IEEE ICIASE 2019, IEEE ECBIOS 2019, IEEE ICKII 2019, ICUSA-GAME 2019, and IEEE ECICE 2019. This Special Issue entitled “Selected Papers from IIKII 2019 conferences” aims to select excellent papers from IIKII 2019 conferences, including symmetry in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and computer science, etc. It selected 21 excellent papers from 750 papers presented in IIKII 2019 conferences on the topic of symmetry. The main goals of this Special Issue are to encourage scientists to publish their experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible, and to discover new scientific knowledge relevant to the topic of symmetry.

Background: Peer evaluation is the cornerstone of science evaluation. In this paper, we analyze whether or not a form of peer evaluation, the pre-publication selection of the best papers in Computer Science (CS) conferences, is better than random, when considering future citations received by the papers. Methods: Considering 12 conferences (for several years), we collected the citation counts from Scopus for both the best papers and the non-best papers. For a different set of 17 conferences, we collected the data from Google Scholar. For each data set, we computed the proportion of cases whereby the best paper has more citations. We also compare this proportion for years before 2010 and after to evaluate if there is a propaganda effect. Finally, we count the proportion of best papers that are in the top 10% and 20% most cited for each conference instance. Results: The probability that a best paper will receive more citations than a non best paper is 0.72 (95% CI = 0.66, 0.77) for the Scopus data, and 0.78 (95% CI = 0.74, 0.81) for the Scholar data. There are no significant changes in the probabilities for different years. Also, 51% of the best papers are among the top 10% most cited papers in each conference/year, and 64% of them are among the top 20% most cited. Discussion: There is strong evidence that the selection of best papers in Computer Science conferences is better than a random selection, and that a significant number of the best papers are among the top cited papers in the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science as a whole is organized into broad fields, and as a consequence, research, resources, students, etc., are also classified, assigned, or invited following a similar structure. Some fields have been established for centuries, and some others are just flourishing. Funding, staff, etc., to support fields are offered if there is some activity on it, commonly measured in terms of the number of published scientific papers. How to find them? There exist well-respected listings where scientific journals are ascribed to one or more knowledge fields. Such lists are human-made, but the complexity begins when a field covers more than one area of knowledge. How to discern if a particular paper is devoted to a field not considered in such lists? In this work, we propose a methodology able to classify the universe of papers into two classes; those belonging to the field of interest, and those that do not. This proposed procedure learns from the title and abstract of papers published in monothematic or "pure" journals. Provided that such journals exist, the procedure could be applied to any field of knowledge. We tested the process with Geographic Information Science. The field has contacts with Computer Science, Mathematics, Cartography, and others, a fact which makes the task very difficult. We also tested our procedure and analyzed its results with three different criteria, illustrating its power and capabilities. Interesting findings were found, where our proposed solution reached similar results as human taggers also similar results compared with state-of-the-art related work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few high schools offer Information Technology (IT)) as a subject in South Africa. This paper used Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital to investigate the reasons why many public schools are shunning away from including IT in their curriculum. Data were collected using a questionnaire and analysed using ANOVA, to determine whether cultural capital influences choosing IT as one of the subjects in the school curriculum. The results showed that public high school principals view IT as a subject that should be done in schools where there is medium-to-high cultural capital status. It is a challenge for schools with low cultural capital to offer IT among their subjects as it is not practiced by the community or society in which the schools exist. The paper concludes by recommending that there is room for the so-called 'low cultural capital' schools to offer IT among their subjects despite the challenges they are facing. Cultural capital does not hinder students' performance. Students from low cultural capital communities can achieve good grades even though they learn under difficult circumstances of inadequate educational resources.

Sentiment analysis is one of the fastest growing research areas in computer science, making it challenging to keep track of all the activities in the area. We present a computer-assisted literature review, where we utilize both text mining and qualitative coding, and analyze 6996 papers from Scopus. We find that the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990’s. However, the outbreak of computer-based sentiment analysis only occurred with the availability of subjective texts on the Web. Consequently, 99% of the papers have been published after 2004. Sentiment analysis papers are scattered to multiple publication venues, and the combined number of papers in the top-15 venues only represent ca. 30% of the papers in total. We present the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus and a taxonomy of research topics. In recent years, sentiment analysis has shifted from analyzing online product reviews to social media texts from Twitter and Facebook. Many topics beyond product reviews like stock markets, elections, disasters, medicine, software engineering and cyberbullying extend the utilization of sentiment analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) is a globally recognised publication outlet for the field of Computer Science, including in South Africa. In this study, spanning from 1973 to 2022, we investigated the research participation of South African based authors in LNCS. The publication output and citation impact of these authors were compared to the global Computer Science and LNCS output. The authorship patterns and collaborative behaviour of South African LNCS papers were explored, and a keyword or topic analysis also conducted. Of the total of 518 662 LNCS papers published globally between 1973 and 2022, South African based researchers contributed 1150 papers (0.22%). The LNCS papers from South Africa exhibit a strong collaborative publication culture, with 1043 (91%) co-authored and 107 (9%) singleauthored works. Local LNCS researchers prefer institutional collaboration (43%), followed by international (37%) and national collaboration (11%). Europe emerged as the most significant collaboration partner for LNCS researchers in South Africa. Of the 1150 papers, 836 (73%) had received citations, while 314 (27%) had not. On average, papers published by South African based authors received 6.05 citations, compared to the global LNCS average of 9.49 citations per paper. A keyword analysis revealed that the majority of papers by South African authors focus on artificial intelligence. The results indicate that, although LNCS serves as a reputable dissemination platform for Computer Science research output both globally and locally, South African authors should consider publishing more journal articles to build and improve their researcher profiles. Significance: * The study shows that LNCS is the most frequent publication outlet for Computer Science researchers, globally and in South Africa. * The study offers insight into the publication output, authorship patterns, collaborative behaviour and citation impact of South African based Computer Science researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is no longer something that can only be experienced in a museum exhibition. Digital tools have facilitated the distribution of material relating to artefacts, both in its representation and in presenting its context. This paper describes how digital modelling techniques can be synthesised with 3D scanning to digitally restore artefacts and create authentic replicas of their original states. The digital artefacts can then be used to assist the process of interpreting these artefacts in diverse forms, both in the museum and outside the museum. The study looks at Pictish sculpture as a case-study, restoring 3D models of two stones, and creating varying opportunities for their interpretation. As part of this study, new interactive tools, a virtual reality environment, and a virtual tour are built to assist immersive interpretation of the Pictish sculpture. The application of these digitised objects serves as an opportunity for informal learning. These applications were evaluated during a drop-in session. Findings show that all participants enjoyed the immersive mode of learning with 89% also showing a willingness to learn more about the topic.