In a Northeastern lab, students sit around four tables that are pushed together. In the foreground, three students talk with their laptops open on the table.

Computer Science Education at Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Fundamental research in CS education and broadening participation

Computing education research studies how students learn computing, effective pedagogies for teaching computing, and helping all students, regardless of prior coding experience, succeed in computing.  At Khoury College of Computer Sciences, our research runs the gamut from broadening participation in computing through systemic changes; how to best train teaching assistants; teaching ethics in technology; studying how to incorporate generative AI into the introductory sequence; how computing can be combined with other fields to create interdisciplinary computing majors; how to create new pathways to the MS in computing; and national trends in curriculum and best practices in curricular design.

Meet our faculty

Khoury faculty Ellen Spertus (left) discusses course material with a student sitting at right. The student is working on a laptop.

Two students sit with a faculty member during a Break Into Tech event

The impact of our work

As part of our mission of CS for everyone, Khoury College is committed to making the study of computer science available and accessible to anyone interested in the field. This belief extends beyond the bounds of Northeastern to work we do on an ongoing basis with colleges and universities around the globe — sharing best practices and collaborating on research.

Sample research areas

Interdisciplinary computing majors
Systemic, sustainable changes to remove institutional barriers to expand student opportunity to discover persist in and graduate from computing programs
The impact of generative AI in helping students learn to code
Pathways to the MS in CS, DS, AI, and Cybersecurity for students who did not study computing as undergraduates
Embedding ethics throughout the computing curriculum
The structural complexity of computing programs nationally and the impact on broadening participation in computing

Two students discuss a research poster at a research expo

Two students sitting at a large desk watch a class lecture. The student on the right is pointing toward the front of the classroom.

Current project highlights

Understanding and improving how beginning programmers interact with LLMs

Researchers examine fundamental questions of how beginning programmers interact with large language models (LLMs) in programming tasks. Do beginners struggle because they lack the right technical vocabulary, or because they omit crucial details LLMs need? Does the unpredictable nature of these models lead them to believe their prompts are more effective than they really are? And to what extent do beginners misunderstand the code that LLMs produce? Findings so far show that without appropriate training, beginners often make superficial and unhelpful changes to their prompts, don’t notice the importance of conveying full context, and struggle to interpret LLM-generated code. This work paves the way to develop new ways to teach students how to work with LLMs for programming tasks, and how to improve LLMs to better suit the needs of new programmers.

Investigating the design and implementation of CS curricula and their impact on student progress

Researchers investigate the design and implementation of computer science curricula and their impact on student participation and progress, particularly for students new to computing. We examine whether the placement of certain courses impacts students’ decisions to major in computer science or unintentionally creates barriers. We identify the courses necessary for students at various developmental stages and explore best practices in curriculum design. Additionally, we analyze retention rates across different degree programs and identify factors influencing course selection and student performance.

Developing and analyzing TA recruitment, training, and evaluation in higher ed

Khoury researchers’ work on teaching assistants (TAs) recognizes the important role they play for both students and faculty in computing programs. We focus on improving student support and TA preparedness with our work on developing, launching, and analyzing TA training programs, and on identifying areas for improvement with broader analysis of student, TA, and faculty experiences within this domain. In support of this work, we ask questions like what barriers are keeping students away from office hours? Are certain students more affected than others? How do we evaluate TA training, and do TAs benefit from being evaluated? Can we identify areas of bias in our TA pipeline and how might we address them? What other factors, such as extracurricular experiences, may be affecting who chooses to TA and how TAs are chosen?

Understanding and transforming CS education in higher ed

Researchers study the landscape of how computer science is offered, what math requirements are common, how universities are adapting to offer more AI with an understanding of the myriad university contexts. We study the impact of systemic, sustainable changes to introductory sequence in CS, to student support and to the major. A recent focus is a 10-university study of how interdisciplinary computing degrees can be effectively implemented and their impact on students and the university writ large.

Learn more about the CIC

Recent research publications

Does Reducing Curricular Complexity Impact Student Success in Computer Science?
Authors: Sumukhi Ganesan, Albert Lionelle, Catherine Gill, Carla Brodley (Proceedings of SIGCSE 2025)

Computer science degree requirements often have a rigid pre- and corequisite structure, which can impede a student’s progression through a degree, and in particular can add one or more semesters to degree time to completion. We present the results of a comparative analysis of curricula before and after a major structural revision. The first curriculum adheres to the conventional rigid prerequisite structure, while the second emphasizes student choice and multiple pathways through the degree. No changes were made to the course content/outcomes between the two versions. The new curriculum, with a 60% reduction in curricular structural complexity, showed both increased retention of students over the old curriculum (67% to 98%) and an increase in the number of students converting from undeclared to computer science (44% to 69%).

An MS in CS for Non-CS Majors: A Ten-Year Retrospective
Authors: Logan W. Schmidt, Caitlin J. Kidder, Ildar Akhmetov, Megan Bebis, Alan C. Jamieson, Albert Lionelle, Sarah Maravetz, Sami Rollins, Ethan Selinger (Proceedings of SIGCSE 2025)

For the last 10 years, Northeastern University has offered a two-semester bridge into a master’s in computer science for people with undergraduate degrees in non-computing disciplines. The bridge program has over 2,000 currently enrolled students with more than 50% women every year since 2020, and domestic enrollment has increased relative to direct-entry master’s students. Our data show that bridge students, including those with non-STEM backgrounds, perform comparably to direct-entry students in terms of GPA and job outcomes.

An Analysis of the Math Requirements of 199 CS BS/BA Degrees at 158 US Universities
Authors: Carla E. Brodley, McKenna Quam, and Mark Weiss (Communications of the ACM, 2024)

For at least 40 years, there has been debate and disagreement as to the role of mathematics in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the math requirements of 199 computer science (CS) BS/BA degrees from 158 universities, looking not only at which math classes are required, but at how they are used as prerequisites (and corequisites) for CS courses.

Teaching Assistant Training: An Adjustable Curriculum for Computing Disciplines
Authors: Felix Muzny, Michael D. Shah (Proceedings of SIGCSE 2023)

We present an adaptable curriculum for training undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in computing disciplines that is modular, synchronous, and explicitly mirrors the teaching techniques that are used in our classes. Our curriculum is modular, with each component able to be expanded or compressed based on institutional needs and resources. It is appropriate for TAs from CS1 through advanced computing classes.

Substance Beats Style: Why Beginning Students Fail to Code with LLMs
Authors: Francesca Lucchetti, Zixuan Wu, Arjun Guha, Molly Q Feldman, and Carolyn Jane Anderson (Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL), 2025)

Although LLMs are increasing the productivity of professional programmers, existing work shows that beginners struggle to prompt LLMs to solve text-to-code tasks. Why is this the case? This paper explores two competing hypotheses about the cause of student-LLM miscommunication: (1) students simply lack the technical vocabulary needed to write good prompts, and (2) students do not understand the extent of information that LLMs need to solve code generation tasks. We find that substance beats style: a poor grasp of technical vocabulary is merely correlated with prompt failure; that the information content of prompts predicts success; that students get stuck making trivial edits; and more.

Related labs and groups

Center for Inclusive Computing

Programming Research Lab

Faculty members

Adeel Bhutta

Adeel A. Bhutta is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College. His research primarily focuses on image processing and computer vision, and he is currently working on selective subtraction and deep learning. A recipient of numerous awards, he has taught a wide range of courses during his teaching career, including ones he developed.
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Ryan Bockmon

Ryan Bockmon is an assistant teaching professor at Khoury College. His research career has covered data science, computing education, cognitive science, and augmented reality, and his courses on masters-level data science, algorithms, and computer vision aim to improve on the areas of student experience he struggled with during his own studies.
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Carla E. Brodley

Carla Brodley is the dean of inclusive computing at Khoury College and the founding executive director of Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing, which aims to remove barriers to participation in the field. She was dean of Khoury College from 2014 to 2021.
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Nate Derbinsky

Nate Derbinsky is a teaching professor and the associate dean of the global campus at Khoury College in Boston. His research operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence, optimization, machine learning, and database systems, and he has been working to deliver quality computer science education for students from kindergarten through graduate school for nearly 20 years.
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Arjun Guha

Arjun Guha is an associate professor at Khoury College. His programming languages research addresses security and reliability problems in web programming, systems, and robotics.
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Lama Hamandi

Lama Hamandi is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on systems and networking.
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Youna Jung

Youna Jung is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College. She teaches courses on programming, databases, operating systems, security, and privacy, and her research has encompassed AI, mobile health care, and collaborative, social, and ubiquitous computing, among other topics.
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Jeongkyu Lee

Jeongkyu Lee is a teaching professor at Khoury College and a former database administrator with Hana Bank and IBM. He teaches courses in big data, NoSQL databases, Python, and statistics.
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Benjamin Lerner

Benjamin Lerner is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College, and received the school’s CCIS Teacher of the Year and University Excellence in Teaching awards in 2017. His research explores semantics and programming languages, and he developed a language called Pyret to help introduce students to programming.
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Albert Lionelle

Albert Lionelle is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College, and the director of the Align Online program. His research centers on the use of computing tools and inclusive pedagogy to enable better computer science education.
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Joydeep Mitra

Joydeep Mitra is an assistant teaching professor at Khoury College. His research interests center around mobile app security and privacy, and he’s been recognized by Google with two Android security awards for discovering vulnerabilities in the Android platform.
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Felix Muzny

Felix Muzny is a clinical instructor and the director of teaching assistants at Khoury College. They care deeply about making computing classrooms more welcoming for all students, and their teaching and research both focus on computing education, digital humanities, and the intersection of sociology, ethics, and computing.
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Vance Ricks

Vance Ricks is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College, jointly appointed with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. His teaching and research focus on ethical dimensions of computer technologies, and he is affiliated with the Algorithm Auditing Research Group.
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Sami Rollins

Sami Rollins is a teaching professor and director of graduate computing programs at the Oakland campus. Her research includes broadening participation in computing, computer science education, and mobile and distributed computing.
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Logan Schmidt

Logan Schmidt is an assistant teaching professor at Khoury College, and the assistant director of computing programs for the Vancouver campus. He is a graduate of the Align program himself, and in both his research and teaching work he aims to introduce newcomers to computer science fundamentals in a way that helps them effectively build new careers.
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Sarita Singh

Sarita Singh is an associate teaching professor at Khoury College. Her research interests include education technology and cybersecurity. Before joining Northeastern, she accrued more than 25 years of experience in areas including teaching, industry, and research.
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Ilmi Yoon

Ilmi Yoon is a teaching professor at Khoury College, and a director of computing programs at the Silicon Valley campus. As both a teacher with two decades of experience at San Francisco State and as a researcher studying human-centered AI, video accessibility, and socially responsible computing, Yoon focuses on engaging underrepresented and marginalized groups in computing and computing education.
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