Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education | 2019
Debriefing Lab Content Using Active Learning
Abstract
Labs in a large lecture course provide highly scaffolded programming exercises. Despite positive student feedback, some students were not achieving the learning goals. This project attempted to increase student s conceptual understanding using short active learning exercises. The first iteration of this project used two versions of active learning: present several multiple-choice questions about the lab material, then either provide a full debrief of all answers or a partial debrief of only the correct answer. The control group was the previous semester s course when no debriefing was done. Two research questions were evaluated. First, does debriefing enhance learning in a computer science course? We found that students performed significantly better on debriefed items compared to students that were not debriefed. These results were unaffected by individual student GPA as a predictor. Second, does level of depth of debriefing affect learning? We found no significant difference between full debrief and partial debrief groups. These results were replicated in a second trial that compared full, partial, and no debriefing. In the second iteration of the project, each of three sections were given a full debrief, partial debrief, or no debrief (only the correct answer was given with no explanation). The full debrief group and the partial debrief group used the Think-Pair-Share method: pairs of students discussed the questions and various answers; one pair was chosen at random to answer each question. The research question is, does the level of depth of the debriefing intervention among the three treatments affect learning?