Social scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise,

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The Personal Software Process (PSP) is a methodology for systematic and continuous improvement of an individual software engineer's software production capabilities. The proponents of the PSP claim that the PSP methods improve in particular the program quality and the capability for accurate estimation of the development time, but do not impair productivity. We have performed a controlled experiment for assessing these and related claims. The experiment compares the performance of a group of students that have just previously participated in a PSP course to a comparable set of students from a "normal" programming course. This report presents in detail the experiment design and setup, the results of the experiment, and our interpretation of the results. The results indicate that the claims are basically correct, but the improvements may be a lot smaller than expected. However, we found an important additional benefit from PSP that is not usually mentioned by the PSP proponents: The perf...

Advocates of software design patterns claim that using design patterns improves communication between software developers. The controlled experiment that we describe in this report tests the hypotheses that software maintainers of well-structured, well-documented software containing design patterns can make changes (1) faster and (2) with less errors if the use of patterns is explicitly documented in the software. The experiment was performed with 22 participants of a university course on C ++ and design patterns; it is similar to a previous experiment performed in Karlsruhe. For one of the two experiment tasks the experiment finds that both hypotheses appear to be true. For the other task the results are inconclusive, presumably because the task was too difficult for the given experience level of the subjects. 1 Contents 1 Introduction 4 1.1 DesignPatterns .......................................... 4 1.2 ExperimentOverview....................................... 5 1.3 D...

Advocates of software design patterns claim that using design patterns improves communication between software people. The controlled experiment that we describe in this report tests the hypotheses that software maintainers of well-structured, well-documented software containing design patterns can make changes (1) faster and (2) with less errors if the use of patterns is explicitly documented in the software. The experiment was performed with 74 participants of a university course on Java and design patterns. It finds that both hypotheses appear to be true, although the observed effects were relatively weak, presumably because the tasks were too simple in the experiment. Contents 1 Introduction 4 1.1 Design patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Experiment overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Related work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Software design patterns are a promising idea with many advocates. While subjective reports of their usefulness are available, scientific proof is still missing. We consider the case of programmers using design pattern documentation (in the form of comments in the source program) during maintenance. Is such pattern documentation (PD) helpful for understanding a program more quickly and designing better solutions for given maintenance tasks? We describe a controlled experiment for investigating this question, present its results, and conclude that design pattern documentation can speed up program changes as well as improve their quality. 1 Background Design patterns [3] are a promising approach to simplifying the design and construction as well as the understanding and evolution of software systems. Design patterns are prepackaged design solutions on the level of a few classes ("micro architectures"). They provide a solution approach for a class of problems. Besides the solution(s), de...

This paper focuses on the distinction between methods which are mathematically "clever", and those which are simply crude, typically repetitive and computer intensive, approaches for "crunching" out answers to problems. Examples of the latter include simulated probability distributions and resampling methods in statistics, and iterative methods for solving equations or optimisation problems. Most of these methods require software support, but this is easily provided by a PC. The paper argues that the crunchier methods often have substantial advantages from the perspectives of user-friendliness, reliability (in the sense that misuse is less likely), educational efficiency and realism. This means that they offer very considerable potential for simplifying the mathematical syllabus underlying many areas of applied mathematics such as management science and statistics: crunchier methods can provide the same, or greater, technical power, flexibility and insight, while requiring only a fraction of the mathematical conceptual background needed by their cleverer brethren.

The pioneers of statistics focused on parametric estimation and summary to communicate statistical findings. The tradition of basing inference on parametric fits is a central mode in statistics education, but in statistics applications, computerbased graphical summary is playing an increasingly important role. A parallel development has been the spread of statistics education to almost all disciplines, and thus the need to communicate statistical results to non-specialists has become more acute. These influences of more graphics and a wider distribution require adaptation in our statistics courses. This paper provides examples of, and arguments for, the use of simulation and graphical display, and the role of these techniques in enhancing the verbalization of analytical results. The immediate goal of the paper is to persuade those who design curricula for early statistics courses to provide a serious introduction to graphical data analysis, at the expense of some traditional parametric inference. The ultimate goal is to enable more students to communicate statistical findings effectively.

Methodological reviews have been used successfully to identify research trends and improve research practice in a variety of academic fields. Although there have been three methodological reviews of the emerging field of computer science education research, they lacked reliability or generalizability. Therefore, because of the capacity for a methodological review to improve practice in computer science education and because the previous methodological reviews were lacking, a large scale, reliable, and generalizable methodological review of the recent research on computer science education is reported here. Our overall research question, which has nine subquestions, involved the methodological properties of research reported in articles in major computer science education research forums from the years 2000-2005. The purpose of this methodological review is to provide a methodologically rigorous basis on which to make recommendations for the improvement of computer science education research and to promote informed dialogue about its practice. Material published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact

Twenty-five years ago, the term “technology ” had a rather different meaning than it does today. Anything other than chalk-and-talk or paper-and-pencil was considered technology for teaching. This might have included anything from fuzzy-felt boards to mechanical gadgets, as well as the multimedia of that period (i.e., television, tape recordings, films, and 35mm slides). The title of this Round Table talk