Diane Horton

Diane Horton
  • University of Toronto

About

29
Publications
4,251
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584
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
University of Toronto

Publications

Publications (29)
Conference Paper
Active learning has been shown to improve outcomes [1]. In this workshop, we will share our experiences with active learning in four core computer science courses from CS1 [2] to third year and with class sizes from 120 to 470. We will discuss fully flipped courses, as well as others that were "semi-flipped", and why. We will address practical issu...
Conference Paper
The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments. Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce the ass...
Conference Paper
An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universiti...
Conference Paper
Booming interest in computer science and innovations in the way we teach it have allowed us to teach a larger, more demographically and geographically diverse group of students. One of the new challenges facing us now is that it can be harder for instructors to get to know many of their students, and for students to connect with their peers. Buildi...
Conference Paper
An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universiti...
Conference Paper
Enrollment in post-secondary online courses has been increasing, but several studies have found that the drop rates in online courses are higher than in face-to-face. In our previous study comparing an online section of CS1 with a face-to-face flipped section, we also found the drop rate higher in the online section. Given that we plan to continue...
Conference Paper
When students can choose to take a course online or face-to-face, who chooses each format? Why do students select one format instead of the other? We compare an online section of CS1 to a concurrent face-to-face section and find that the populations in the two sections are very different. In particular, students in the online section have less prio...
Conference Paper
In addition to their role as a summative measure, midterm tests can provide formative feedback that can be used by students to identify areas of weakness and adjust studying approaches. Unfortunately, low levels of test pickup often preclude this type of learning from tests. Even when students do collect their marked tests, it is unclear how much t...
Conference Paper
Many database courses rely on relational algebra (RA) to provide a theoretical foundation for database query languages such as SQL. However, few tools exist to support students in learning RA. To fill this need, we created RAPT. RAPT uses a syntactic and semantic understanding of RA to transform input statements into a variety of outputs, including...
Article
Much attention has been paid to the failure rate in CS1 and attrition between CS1 and CS2. In our study of 1236 CS1 students, we examine subgroups of students, to find out how characteristics such as prior experience and reason for taking the course influence who drops, fails, or passes, and who continues on to CS2. We also examine whether student...
Conference Paper
Alumni make contributions to a Computer Science program in three interconnected ways, all of which relate to the interplay between the academic environment and the "real world." For students who aim to enter the job market upon graduation, alumni provide a friendly way to receive mentoring and advice and develop a professional network. When faculty...
Article
We compare a traditional CS1 offering with an inverted offering delivered the following year to a comparable student population. We measure student attitudes, grades, and final course outcomes and find that, while students in the inverted offering do not report increased enjoyment and are no more likely to pass, learning as measured by final exam p...
Article
The inverted or flipped classroom has been shown to be effective in computer science. Inverted teaching depends on students engaging in both pre- and in-lecture activities. What reward structure will motivate students to do so? We report on our experience with inverted teaching for a one-month unit in a third-year database course.
Conference Paper
In the interest of better understanding why many students fail to complete CS1 successfully, we analyze a class of 555 CS1 students, 127 of whom either failed or dropped the course. We find that students with previous experience are more likely to pass even if the experience is not a formal programming course. Contrary to intuition, students who dr...
Conference Paper
This case study explores an inverted classroom offering of an introductory programming course (CS1). Students prepared for lecture by watching short lecture videos and completing required in-video quiz questions. During lecture, the students worked through exercises with the support of the instructor and teaching assistants. We describe the course...
Conference Paper
Instructors often put students into groups for coursework. Several tools exist to facilitate this process, but they typically limit the criteria one can use for forming groups. We have defined a general mathematical model for group formation: a set of attribute types, group-formation criteria, and fitness measures. We have implemented an optimizer...
Conference Paper
In order to address the under-representation of women in Computer Science, we have created a program for middle-school girls that specifically aims to change their attitudes about CS and encourages them to see it as a potential career. Our assessment of the program shows that it did indeed have a significant, positive impact and suggests that this...
Conference Paper
In order to address the under-representation of women in Computer Science, we have created a program for middle-school girls that specifically aims to change their attitudes about CS and encourages them to see it as a potential career. Our assessment of the program shows that it did indeed have a significant, positive impact and suggests that this...
Article
Full-text available
Most theories of presupposition implicitly assume that presuppositions are facts, mxd that all agents involved in a discourse shm'e belief in the presuppositions that it generates. These unrealistic assumptions can be elilninated if each presupposition is treated as the belief of an agent. However, it is not enough to consider only the beliefs of t...
Article
Full-text available
this paper, we describe recent computational work investigating language use in context. This means, first, going beyond sentence boundaries and processing discourse---treating texts or dialogues as wholes composed of interrelated parts, rather than merely as sequences of isolated sentences. Any piece of discourse establishes a linguistic context a...
Article
Participants in a discourse sometimes fail to understand one another, but, when aware of the problem, collaborate upon or negotiate the meaning of a problematic utterance. To address nonunderstanding, we have developed two plan-based models of collaboration in identifying the correct referent of a description: one covers situations where both conve...
Article
Full-text available
Plan-related inference has been one of the most-studied problems in Artificial Intelligence. Pollack (1990) has argued that a plan should be seen as a set of mental attitudes towards a structured object. Although the objects of these attitudes have received far more atten- tion to date than the attitudes themselves, lit- tle has been said about the...

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