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Background and Context: Students’ self-efficacy toward computing affect their participation in related tasks and courses. Self- efficacy is likely influenced by students’ initial experiences and exposure to computer science (CS) activities. Moreover, student interest in a subject likely informs their ability to effectively regulate their learning in that domain. One way to enhance interest in CS is through using collaborative pair programming. Objective: We wanted to explore upper elementary students’ self- efficacy for and conceptual understanding of CS as manifest in collaborative and regulated discourse during pair programming. Method: We implemented a five-week CS intervention with 4th and 5th grade students and collected self-report data on students’ CS attitudes and conceptual understanding, as well as transcripts of dyads talking while problem solving on a pair programming task. Findings: The students’ self-report data, organized by dyad, fell into three categories based on the dyad’s CS self-efficacy and conceptual understanding scores. Findings from within- and cross-case analyses revealed a range of ways the dyads’ self-efficacy and CS conceptual understanding affected their collaborative and regulated discourse. Implications: Recommendations for practitioners and researchers are provided. We suggest that upper elementary students learn about productive disagreement and how to peer model. Additionally, our findings may help practitioners with varied ways to group their students. 

Co-creative proccesses between people can be characterized by rich dialogue that carries each person's ideas into the collaborative space. When people co-create an artifact that is both technical and aesthetic, their dialogue reflects the interplay between these two dimensions. However, the dialogue mechanisms that express this interplay and the extent to which they are related to outcomes, such as peer satisfaction, are not well understood. This paper reports on a study of 68 high school learner dyads' textual dialogues as they create music by writing code together in a digital learning environment for musical remixing. We report on a novel dialogue taxonomy built to capture the technical and aesthetic dimensions of learners' collaborative dialogues. We identified dialogue act n-grams (sequences of length 1, 2, or 3) that are present within the corpus and discovered five significant n-gram predictors for whether a learner felt satisfied with their partner during the collaboration. The learner was more likely to report higher satisfaction with their partner when the learner frequently acknowledges their partner, exchanges positive feedback with their partner, and their partner proposes an idea and elaborates on the idea. In contrast, the learner is more likely to report lower satisfaction with their partner when the learner frequently accepts back-to-back proposals from their partner and when the partner responds to the learner's statements with positive feedback. This work advances understanding of collaborative dialogue within co-creative domains and suggests dialogue strategies that may be helpful to foster co-creativity as learners collaborate to produce a creative artifact. The findings also suggest important areas of focus for intelligent or adaptive systems that aim to support learners during the co-creative process. 

Pair programming is a popular strategy in computer science education to teach programming to novices. In this study, we examined the effect of three different pair programming conditions on up- per elementary school students’ CS conceptual understanding. The three conditions were one-computer with roles (1C with roles), two computers without roles (2C no roles), and two computers with roles (2C with roles). These students were engaged in four days of computer programming activities and took the CS concept assessment, CS attitudes, and collaboration perceptions before and after the activities. We used the validated E-CSCA (Elementary Computer Science Concepts Assessment) to measure elementary students’ understanding of CS concepts. We tested the relation- ship of different pair programming conditions on the students’ CS conceptual understanding and found that different conditions impacted students’ CS conceptual understanding, wherein students in 2C roles demonstrated better CS learning than the other two conditions. The results also showed no changes in students’ CS attitudes and perceptions of collaboration before and after the activities. Furthermore, the results indicated no significant impact of these attitudinal factors on students’ learning CS concepts in pair programming settings. Our study highlights the importance of the roles and number of computers in pair programming settings, especially for elementary students.