Alignment of Deliberate Practice to Micro-credentials in an Introductory Computer Science Course

Abstract

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress Paper presents our approach in designing and incorporating deliberate practices based on micro-credentials for a CS1 (introduction to computer science) course. Based on a set of more than 100 micro-credentials we have created for this course, we designed deliberate questions for each lecture based on the micro-credentials students are supposed to acquire. The deliberate questions are relatively short questions focusing on specific skills/ability, coupled with skill assessments. These deliberate questions are used in our in-class exercise sections, in which we encourage students to practice, give students timely feedback and support them in correcting their code. We compared students' performance in the current semester (spring 2019) with another section of the same CS1 course one year ago (spring 2018). Our data analysis shows that students are more likely to participate and finish the daily exercises, and perform better in formal tests. Besides, using deliberate questions based on micro-credentials can provide instructors information on students overall competencies on different micro-credentials, thus allow instructors to design interventions accordingly.