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Also Your Job to Learn Helping students to reflect on their own learning

Also Your Job to Learn Helping students to reflect on their own learning. Stella Kakavouli & Panagiotis Metaxas Computer Science Department Wellesley College. How students learn.

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Also Your Job to Learn Helping students to reflect on their own learning

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  1. Also Your Job to LearnHelping students to reflect on their own learning Stella Kakavouli & Panagiotis Metaxas Computer Science Department Wellesley College

  2. How students learn • “By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” - Confucius • Socratic method: ask carefully chosen questions, to help student learn through reflection. Method does not scale up though, as we move to the classroom model.

  3. Imitation, Experience, Reflection in CS Courses In lectures we offer a preview of the material to be learned, to prepare the students for what lies ahead. It is rather the easiest part for the student: imitation part Lab sessions and homework assignments provide practice. They design, write, debug and run programs. This is difficult, it is the bitterest: experience part How about the noblest, the reflection part?

  4. Help students set their own learning goals, and monitor their progress in achieving them Employ a “metacognitive” or “learn from your learning” approach Ultimately, students are equipped to develop the ability to take control of their own learning Our inspiration: Reflection in learning

  5. Background • Discuss with students, at the beginning of the semester: • the benefits of learning one-on-one, Socratic method • the way brain works: repetition and reflection • the limits of lecture-style teaching • the need for self-monitoring in their learning Implementation of our approach

  6. What we did • students complete sequence of questionnaires associated with each homework and midterm exam • collective answers, for each questionnaire, are reviewed in class weekly • at the end of the semester, each student received all her answers Implementation of our approach, cont

  7. Perceived level of difficulty of the homework/exam • Time spent: Thinking; Programming; Testing/Documenting • What did you learn by doing this homework? • What you wish you knew before starting this assignment? • What would you like to explore further? • Collaboration: Did you collaborated? Was it helpful? Typical Questionnaire

  8. Results • Overall satisfaction with the course (SEQs) • Change in confidence, according to their own perception

  9. Our CS2 setting • JAVA is the programming language • Lectures: taught by Professor, twice a week • Labs run by Lab Instructor: smaller groups, once a week • Weekly homework assignments, 3 midterm exams, and one final project • Collaboration in assignments is encouraged, while it is required for the final project

  10. Implementation Details We used Google Forms, to: • share the Questionnaire with the class • collect students responses, and • present summary of them to the class Here is a questionnaire with sample responses The Exam questionnaire is a little different Here is an actual class presentation of answers

  11. Resources required Minimal amount of resourses are required! On the instructor’s part: • an hour to create the questionnaire at the beginning of the semester • a few minutes per week to process the data, and produce the charts to share with the class • a few minutes per student to collect her data answers over the semester, and send the personal email

  12. Resources required cont… On the student’s part: about 5 minutes per week to type the answers the questions of course, there is the time for reflection… time well-spent!

  13. Any Extras? • One can add questions on other points of interest • We collected info on collaboration • Collaboration can be encouraged through sharing with the class their own comments • Three fourths of the students had a “great experience” collaborating in their final project, while no one found collaboration “less than helpful”

  14. Conclusions • Reflection, an important part in learning, is underutilized in CS courses • Our system offers a way to encourage students reflect on, and learn from, their own learning • Easy and quick to be set up and administered by the professor, while it requires minimum overhead on the student’s part • Homework questionnaire http://bit.ly/nlMVrV • Exam questionnaire http://bit.ly/oHCABc

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