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Proof by incomplete enumeration and other logical misconceptions

Published: 06 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to reason with formal logic is a foundational skill for computer scientists and computer engineers that scaffolds the abilities to design, debug, and optimize. By interviewing students about their understanding of propositional logic and their ability to translate from English specifications to Boolean expressions, we characterized common misconceptions and novice problem-solving processes of students who had recently completed a digital logic design class. We present these results and discuss their implications for instruction and the development of pedagogical assessment tools known as concept inventories.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '08: Proceedings of the Fourth international Workshop on Computing Education Research
September 2008
192 pages
ISBN:9781605582160
DOI:10.1145/1404520
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. concept inventory
  2. digital logic
  3. discrete math
  4. formal logic
  5. misconceptions

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