부산대학교 도서관

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?