Also "your" job to learn!: helping students to reflect on their learning progress

Authors:
Stella Kakavouli;Panagiotis Metaxas
Affiliations:
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA;Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Venue:
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Most of the time, the pedagogical analysis on student learning is focused on the efforts of the teacher. There is no doubt that teacher actions can have a profound positive effect on student learning. In this paper, we discuss what students can do to increase their learning outcome. In particular, we describe an instrument that facilitates students' reflection of their own learning. Although the use of reflection on learning is not novel, its use in CS education has not been explored extensively. Our system was developed as a result of an experiment that we performed in a CS2 course, successfully giving students opportunities to take control of their own learning process. One of the attractive features of our system is that it is relatively easy for the instructor to set up and monitor the students' progress. In our evaluation of the system, we found that it can increase significantly the students' programming confidence at the end of the course. Even though this paper studies the effectiveness of introducing the "reflection questionnaires" instrument in a CS2-type course, it can be applied to most other courses in a curriculum. We provide the material we used in our experiment so educators can adopt them.