Learning Environments for Fostering Disciplinary Practices in CS Undergraduates

Disciplinary practices are processes and skills applied for sensemaking, reasoning and problem solving. Studies have shown that experts are able to spontaneously apply these skills but novices have difficulty due to various reasons. The aim of this paper is to showcase learning environments that foster disciplinary practices in undergraduate computing students in three contexts - data structures, software design and computer networks. Findings from our studies show that students are able to apply these disciplinary practices to solve ill-structured problems. These findings provide motivation for exploring disciplinary practices in other CS courses as well.