I'm researching how cognitive interventions can impact novice programming ability and help novices succeed in computer science. So my goal is to really help decrease barriers for computing access to potentially disadvantaged communities or for people who may not have the experience or necessary skills coming into college to pursue computing. A lot of times there's an environmental factor into a student's incoming ability. So take spatial ability. This is correlated with things like socioeconomic status and it might be related to the sort of toys that you play as a child. And it's also been connected to success in STEM. This is the same with a lot of different cognitive skills. One thing we did was we took medical imaging scans of novice programmers who had only been programming for about a month and we measured their brain activity. To do the medical imaging we used an FNIR system. It's a cap that goes on the participant's head and then you connect a bunch of lasers to it which shine light into the head and measure something called the bold signal which is the amount of oxygen in the brain. And what we found is that when novices were programming when they're really young it looks more like mental rotation than it does reading. So this is for very very novice programmers and this is in contrast to potentially more expert developers where we see a little bit more similarity between code reading and prose reading. The second study that we looked at was comparing different cognitive interventions with novice programmers and we compared a spatial ability training to a technical reading training. In the spatial training the students went through a workbook where they had to sketch 3d shapes and then they also had basically snap blocks that they were able to manipulate for the sketching and for visualizing these shapes. And what we found was that students in the technical reading training actually performed better on a programming test at the end of the semester than those in the spatial ability. The findings from our two experiments actually work well together. By training novices in domain specific strategies or more reading focused strategies earlier we can see potentially novices become experts faster by encouraging more focused strategies on programming.


The study examines predictors of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across five national samples from the UK, Ireland, USA, Spain and Mexico, finding that while public belief in misinformation is not common, a substantial proportion views it as highly reliable. Increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19 as well as willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and recommend it to vulnerable friends and family. Higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation, suggesting that interventions aimed at improving critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research. This article was authored by John Rosenbeek, Claudia Arschneider, Sarah Dryhurst and others.


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