Role of the programming assignment summary as a qualitative assessment of individual student performance: poster session

• Authors: Karina V. Assiter
• Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
• Year: 2010

Homework assignments in a first or second year undergraduate programming course (CS1--CS3) are essential for skills development; instructors who assign homework in CS1--CS3 would like submitted solutions to both accurately reflect student performance, and to indicate the level of student understanding of course topics. Unfortunately, these are hard to gage when students increasingly have access to solutions on the internet and are frequently encouraged (for sound pedagogical reasons) to work on assignments in groups or pairs. Questions that naturally arise include: a. how much of a students' work is original, in other words not acquired from a friend or an open-source repository, and b. how much did an individual student, working in a group or pair, contribute to the final solution. To address these assessment concerns, we incorporated a summary into the list of programming assignment requirements. Though it serves many roles, including as a vehicle for analysis of course topics, it's most important role is as qualitative measure of an individual students' performance, which can then indirectly inform their final quantitative assessment. This poster describes this assignment summary: including its original purpose, example analysis and summary questions, textual analysis of student responses, and, finally, correlations between responses and student assignment scores.