Developing a reciprocal teaching/learning system for college remedial reading instruction

In face-to-face instruction of Reciprocal Teaching (RT), students’ reading processes and dialogues with their peers are hardly observed. As a result, the teacher has few clues to identify students’ learning difficulties and provide further scaffoldings. To record students’ reading processes and enhance their comprehension, this study reports on the design of an online reciprocal teaching and learning system to support teachers and students in college remedial reading instruction. A sample of 129 under-prepared college students voluntarily signed up to participate in a remedial reading program. They were encouraged to use multiple strategies such as predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing, which were supported by the functionalities of dialogue box, chat room, discussion forum, and annotation tool in the system. In this study, it was observed that students employed the multiple strategies to enhance their reading comprehension, as revealed by the students’ reading processes recorded in the system. When encountering difficulties in using these multiple strategies, students expressed that they observed and learned from the teacher’s or their peers’ externalization of strategy usage. Students’ reading progress in the remedial instruction incorporating the RT system was also identified by the pre- and post-tests. This study suggests that there may be benefits for teachers in encouraging students to interact with others in order to clarify and discuss comprehension questions and constantly monitor and regulate their own reading.     

Does syntax highlighting help programming novices?

Program comprehension is an important skill for programmers – extending and debugging existing source code is part of the daily routine. Syntax highlighting is one of the most common tools used to support developers in understanding algorithms. However, most research in this area originates from a time when programmers used a completely different tool chain. We examined the influence of syntax highlighting on novices’ ability to comprehend source code. Additional analyses cover the influence of task type and programming experience on the code comprehension ability itself and its relation to syntax highlighting. We conducted a controlled experiment with 390 undergraduate students in an introductory Java programming course. We measured the correctness with which they solved small coding tasks. Each test subject received some tasks with syntax highlighting and some without. The data provided no evidence that syntax highlighting improves novices’ ability to comprehend source code. There are very few similar experiments and it is unclear as of yet which factors impact the effectiveness of syntax highlighting. One major limitation may be the types of tasks chosen for this experiment. The results suggest that syntax highlighting squanders a feedback channel from the IDE to the programmer that can be used more effectively.     

A study of concept-based similarity approaches for recommending program examples

This paper investigates a range of concept-based example recommendation approaches that we developed to provide example-based problem-solving support in the domain of programming. The goal of these approaches is to offer students a set of most relevant remedial examples when they have trouble solving a code comprehension problem where students examine a program code to determine its output or the final value of a variable. In this paper, we use the ideas of semantic-level similarity-based linking developed in the area of intelligent hypertext to generate examples for the given problem. To determine the best-performing approach, we explored two groups of similarity approaches for selecting examples: non-structural approaches focusing on examples that are similar to the problem in terms of concept coverage and structural approaches focusing on examples that are similar to the problem by the structure of the content. We also explored the value of personalized example recommendation based on student's knowledge levels and learning goal of the exercise. The paper presents concept-based similarity approaches that we developed, explains the data collection studies and reports the result of comparative analysis. The results of our analysis showed better ranking performance of the personalized structural variant of cosine similarity approach.     

Portable real-time software for 8-bit microprocessors

This paper discusses a method for developing efficient and portable software for 8-bit microprocessors used in real-time applications. The technique used is to design an ‘intermediate level language’ (ILL) which defines low-level primitives to support the real-time application programming and the constructs of high level languages. Thus, the high level language (HLL) program goes through two stages of translation; first to the ILL code and then to the machine code of a microprocessor. The ILL instruction set developed bridges the gap between high level languages and the poor instruction set of microprocessors. This allows the development of optimized and portable code for the microprocessors. The ILL operations, data types, data organization, control structures, synchronization, communication and multi-tasking facilities are described. The effectiveness of this technique is shown by comparing the code generated by the ILL approach with the code available for a sample real-time application written directly in assembly level language.     

基于多模态对比学习的代码表征增强预训练方法

代码表征旨在融合源代码的特征,以获取其语义向量,在基于深度学习的代码智能中扮演着重要角色.传统基于手工的代码表征依赖领域专家的标注,繁重耗时,且无法灵活地复用于特定下游任务,这与绿色低碳的发展理念极不相符.因此,近年来,许多自监督学习的编程语言大规模预训练模型(如CodeBERT)应运而生,为获取通用代码表征提供了有效途径.这些模型通过预训练获得通用的代码表征,然后在具体任务上进行微调,取得了显著成果.但是,要准确表示代码的语义信息,需要融合所有抽象层次的特征(文本级、语义级、功能级和结构级).然而,现有模型将编程语言仅视为类似于自然语言的普通文本序列,忽略了它的功能级和结构级特征.因此,旨在进一步提高代码表征的准确性,提出了基于多模态对比学习的代码表征增强的预训练模型(representation enhanced contrastive multimodal pretraining, REcomp). REcomp设计了新的语义级-结构级特征融合算法,将它用于序列化抽象语法树,并通过多模态对比学习的方法将该复合特征与编程语言的文本级和功能级特征相融合,以实现更精准的语义建模.最后,...     

C语言代码缺陷分析辅助编程实践系统

网络课程C语言编程学习中, 师生互动性差、教学效率低, 学生难以凭借自身能力解决编程中常见的代码缺陷问题. 为了更好帮助学生解决学习中的难题, 辅助老师达到教学目的, 研究一款代码缺陷检测辅助学生编程实践系统. 该系统首先对易犯的代码缺陷分类, 分析编译器不易检测的语法、词法和语义缺陷; 然后构建智能分析器,集成多种检...     

源代码在线评测系统的设计与实现

在教学领域中,传统的程序评测方式主要为手工评测,随着计算机技术的高速发展以及对编程水平要求的提高,该方式已暴露出大量的弊端。为了更好的促进学生学习编程并减轻教师负担,本文设计一种基于B／S结构的用于辅助教学的源代码在线评测系统,并介绍系统的主要功能模块以及实现技术。     

Instructional effectiveness of a computer-supported program for teaching reading comprehension strategies

This article examines the effectiveness of a computer-based instructional program (e-PELS) aimed at direct instruction in a collection of reading comprehension strategies. In e-PELS, students learn to highlight and outline expository passages based on various types of text structures (such as comparison or cause-and-effect) as well as to paraphrase, self-question, and summarize. The study involved 1041 fourth-grade elementary students from 21 schools distributed in three regions in central Chile. Participant teachers integrated this program into the Spanish language curriculum, instructing their students during thirty sessions of 90 min each during one school semester. Pretest-to-posttest gains in reading comprehension scores were significantly greater for students instructed with this program than for students who received traditional instruction (d = .5), with particularly strong effects for lower-achieving students (d = .7). The findings support the efficacy of direct instruction in specific learning strategies in a computer-based environment.     

Supporting secondary school students' reading comprehension in computer environments: A systematic review

This systematic literature review analysed the content, focus, provision, and effects of support (scaffolds) in computer environments with regard to secondary school students' reading comprehension outcomes. The relevant search terms yielded many hits (period 2000–2017); however, intervention studies regarding reading comprehension of expository texts in computer environments seemed to be rather scarce. A careful analysis of these studies revealed that most of them provided cognitive support and some provided metacognitive support. Almost all studies focused on learning products, half of them in combination with learning processes. Most studies provided support in the form of statements, often provided during the task. Both cognitive and metacognitive scaffolds in computer environments produced a positive effect on reading comprehension outcomes. However, only one of the studies provided students with motivational scaffolds. Because the details of the design and content of the scaffolds used in all studies often remained unclear, it was difficult to determine the effectiveness of specific characteristics of scaffolds in computer environments. It is suggested that researchers should be more careful and comprehensive in designing and reporting on research in this area. Recommendations for future research and practical implementations of computer environments are presented.     

融合BERT语义表示的高考语文阅读理解问答研究

高考语文阅读理解问答相对普通阅读理解问答难度更大,同时高考问答任务中的训练数据较少,目前的深度学习方法不能取得良好的答题效果。针对这些问题,该文提出融合BERT语义表示的高考阅读理解答案候选句抽取方法。首先,采用改进的MMR算法对段落进行筛选;其次,运用微调之后的BERT模型对句子进行语义表示;再次,通过SoftMax分类器对答案候选句进行抽取,最后利用PageRank排序算法对输出结果进行二次排序。该方法在北京近十年高考语文阅读理解问答题上的召回率和准确率分别达到了61.2%和50.1%,验证了该方法的有效性。     

面向Aspect的程序设计——一种新的编程范型

Currently the main stream programming paradigm is Object Oriented Programming: OOP, which has got-ten great success. The advantage of OOP is that it provides effective modularity support, and enables direct mappingfrom requirement space to design space, etc. However, there are still some specific requirement and design issues,e.g. , security and logging, which are hard to be implemented with clear modularity using either procedural or OOP techniques. In fact, the code of this kind of concerns are often scattered through out the whole system, resulting insome ugly scattering code and tangling code. Such kinds of programs are often difficult to develop and maintain. Re-cently a new programming paradigm Aspect Oriented Programming：AOP, which aims at solving the crosscutting concerns, has gained much popularity. This paper is an overview of AOP.     

A survey of external representations employed in object-oriented programming environments

This document presents an overview of the program visualisations additional to the program code provided by some of the most popular object-oriented programming environments to support tasks involving program comprehension. These representations were compared in terms of the programming aspects they highlight and of their information modality. Those with common characteristics according to these criteria were identified. Finally, a brief analysis of these common representations in terms of Green's Cognitive Dimensions is presented.Two questions arising from this survey are (a) whether representations additional to the code should be redundant and highlight similar information to the main notation or be complementary and highlight different programming aspects and (b) which factors might increase the cognitive difficulty of co-ordinating these additional representations and the program code. More theoretical knowledge about the way these additional representations influence the comprehension of computer programs seems to be needed.     

基于用户输入分析的返回导向编程攻击检测

返回导向编程攻击,通过将程序中现有的二进制代码片段进行有机的组合,能有效地生成恶意代码攻击程序,而现有的攻击检测技术不能很好地对这类攻击进行检测。介绍返回导向编程攻击,分析并指出返回栈的成功构造是使得这种攻击成功的关键事实。基于这个事实,设计并实现了一个返回导向编程攻击的检测系统B re。tB ret的检测原理和攻击者利用的代码片段是正交的,从而可以很好地防御基于"更新-加载-跳转"指令序列的返回导向编程攻击。在对B ret的攻击检测能力和性能评测中,B ret展示了高效的检测能力,几乎不产生误报和漏报,同时,使用B ret保护的程序产生了非常小的性能开销。     

Augmenting paper-based learning with mobile phones

Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive tasks and school learning. Although learning strategies such as selective verbatim note-taking or question-asking may foster intentional recall or resolve comprehension difficulties in paper-based learning practice, improvement in learning may depend on the opportunity and quality of which students apply note-taking, review notes, or enhance comprehension through questioning. This study aims to complement a paper textbook with a mobile phone and to treat the combination as a whole to facilitate verbatim note-taking, resolving comprehension questions, and receiving reading recommendations. The textbook paragraphs were augmented with line numbers to facilitate coordination between the mobile phone and the paper textbook. An eight-week comparative study was conducted to explore the use of two reading vehicles. The results and findings show that using a mobile phone to augment paper-based learning is technically feasible and seems to promote the application of verbatim note-taking and posting comprehension questions for discussion. However, the results of two course tests indicate that consequent learning improvement seemed inconsistent among the students. A six-week case study was also conducted to explore the implications of the augmented support to students’ learning practice. The findings show that mobile phones as learning supportive tools to augment paper-based learning could support students’ planning and management of learning strategies or activities. The portability of mobile phones and paper textbooks and the ubiquitous connection of paper-based learning with an online learning community may provide the flexibility in planning ahead for suitable learning strategies or activities and may enhance students’ assessment for management of students’ learning goals.     

Assisting comprehension of animation programs through interactive code visualization

Visual languages have been widely used to help people create animation programs. However, current programming environments lack features supporting efficient code exploration and program comprehension, particularly for understanding relationships among parts of animation programs. In this paper, we present novel interactive visualizations aimed at helping people to understand animation programs. We conducted an empirical study to evaluate the impact of these visualizations on programmer comprehension of the code, showing that our approach enabled programmers to comprehend more information with less effort and in less time. This result is potentially significant because it demonstrates an approach for helping users to explore and understand animation code. We anticipate that this approach could be applied in a wide variety of animation programming tools, which could ease common animation programming tasks that require understanding code.     

RISC-V MCU的FreeRTOS移植与应用开发

具有相同的RISC-V指令集的处理器实现并不相同.本文将针对基于RISC-V开源指令集的处理器芯片GD32VF103 MCU,介绍FreeRTOS在IAR EWRISC-V编译和开发环境下的移植过程.采用RTOS后,嵌入式系统很难监控系统的运行时行为、发现应用存在的问题,本文基于Tracealyzer分析工具直观地跟踪...     

Method and implementation for investigating code clones in a software system

Maintaining software systems is becoming more difficult as the size and complexity of software increase. One factor that complicates software maintenance is the presence of code clones. A code clone is a code fragment that has identical or similar code fragments to it in the source code. Code clones are introduced for various reasons such as reusing code by ‘copy and paste’. If modifying a code clone with many similar code fragments, we must consider whether to modify each of them. Especially for large-scale software, such a process is very complicated and expensive. In this paper, we propose methods of visualizing and featuring code clones to support their understanding in large-scale software. The methods have been implemented as a tool called Gemini, which has applied to an open source software system. Application results show the usefulness and capability of our system.     

PC-OCCAM

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel occam development system, PC-OCCAM, for the IBM PC and compatibles running under MS-DOS. It accepts a reasonable subset of the occam 2 programming language. From the occam source code, the system produces an intermediate code which translates to native Intel 8086 machine code and executes on the IBM PC. An accompanying run-time system provides the necessary support environment.     

利用VC++实现大容量文件加速存取

结合实际开发经验总结出在VC平台下加速大容量文件存取速度的方法。并给出代码清单。     

基于强化学习算法的智能飞控开发系统

无人机控制器的设计开发是一项复杂的系统工程, 传统的基于代码编程的开发方式存在开发难度大、周期长及错误率高等缺点. 同时, 强化学习智能飞控算法虽在仿真中取得很好的性能, 但在实际中仍缺乏一套完备的开发系统. 本文提出一套基于模型的智能飞控开发系统, 使用模块化编程及自动代码生成技术, 将强化学习算法应用于飞控的嵌入式开发与部署. 该系统可以实现强化学习算法的训练仿真、测试及硬件部署, 旨在提升以强化学习为代表的智能控制算法的部署速度, 同时降低智能飞行控制系统的开发难度.