Promoting Engagement in a CS1 Course with Assessment for Learning

Simon Liénardy,Laurent Leduc,Benoit Donnet

doi:10.5204/ssj.1668

Abstract

This practice report discusses the evolution of a CS1 Course taught at the University of Liège, Belgium. Over the last seven years several teaching activities have been thought to complement traditional theoretical courses and exercise sessions in order to promote students’ engagement. The result is aligned with (i) the principles of assessment for learning, which consists in leveraging the assessment to improve the students learning, and (ii) the concept of blended learning. This report describes the difficulties the students faced and what we implemented to assist our course evolution. We also present and discuss results showing that, despite a high drop-out rate, we managed to engage students to work on a regular basis and, in some cases, raise their performance levels.

Highlights

Teaching Introduction to Programming (i.e., CS1) is known to be a difficult task for many students and has been the topic of a large number of research studies (Luxton-Reilly et al 2018, Medeiros et al, 2019)
The core change took place in 2016 when we introduced a Programming Challenges Activity (PCA), i.e., a teaching activity spread over the whole semester and consisting in submitting small pieces of code on a platform, called CAFÉ (Correction Automatique et Feedback des Étudiants), that immediately corrects them and provides students with both feedback and, starting 2018, feedforward (Liénardy et al, 2020)
The first multiple choice questions (MCQ) have a participation rate higher than 80%. It decreases a bit for the third MCQs that take place shortly after the mid-term exam but before the results are made available to the students

Summary

Background

Teaching Introduction to Programming (i.e., CS1) is known to be a difficult task for many students and has been the topic of a large number of research studies (Luxton-Reilly et al 2018, Medeiros et al, 2019). 6. As the course focuses on a programming methodology, it covers the good practices of a programmer: how to test one’s code, how to efficiently search for help in the proper resources (documentation, Internet, etc.) in order to turn students into “effective lifelong learners” (Sambell et al, 2013, p.7). As the course focuses on a programming methodology, it covers the good practices of a programmer: how to test one’s code, how to efficiently search for help in the proper resources (documentation, Internet, etc.) in order to turn students into “effective lifelong learners” (Sambell et al, 2013, p.7) We anticipate these six principles will contribute to increasing students’ engagement. The proportions of students that come for the first time to the university (labelled as fresh people) are 76.1%, repeaters 16.3%, and transfer students (i.e., those who reoriented from another curriculum)

Course Results

Results

Discussion and Lessons