Eleanor O'Rourke
Northwestern University, IL·Computer Science·Early-career
Programming skills are in high demand, yet many students struggle in introductory computer science (CS) courses and leave the major. Learning to program means mastering practices like problem-solving, systematic debugging and planning.
- Fields
Computer Science
Education Research
Psychology
- Topics
computing education
CS education
introductory programming
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop behavioral models that automatically detect programming practices, such as planning, debugging and looking up syntax, from students' activity in programming environments.
- Conduct a large-scale study of how introductory CS students' motivations, self-efficacy and programming practices relate, using automatically detected behavior.
- Design and evaluate interventions within intelligent programming environments that give students personalized guidance to build motivation and effective expert practices.
More about the research
In large classes, however, instructors rarely see how students work, only their final code. This project builds intelligent programming environments that automatically observe how students program. The environments then adapt to students' motivations and practices.
Why it matters
Tools that detect how students program and offer personalized guidance could help introductory CS students adopt expert practices without losing confidence. This could improve course performance and retention in the major, especially in large classes where instructors cannot watch each student's process. Instructors could also gain insight into how their students work.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Narges Norouzi
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Education Research
Model students' problem-solving strategies and algorithmic thinking in computer science courses by integrating fine-grained process data to trace competencies across levels of abstraction.
Haijun Xia
University of California-San Diego, CA·Computer Science
Analyze diagrams that programmers produce themselves to identify what qualities make graphics effective and directly manipulable for understanding and changing code.
Ryan McMahan
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Computer Science
Develop and validate the QIS Concept Introductory Test (QISCIT) and label misconceptions in data from a controlled general-population study of QubitVR, a virtual reality app for learning quantum concepts.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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