1. Also Your Job to Learn Helping students to reflect on their own learning
Stella Kakavouli & Panagiotis Metaxas
Computer Science Department
Wellesley College

2. How students learn
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
- Confucius
Socratic method: ask carefully chosen questions, to help student learn through reflection.
Method does not scale up though, as we move to the classroom model.

3. Imitation, Experience, Reflection in CS Courses
In lectures we offer a preview of the material to be learned, to prepare the students for what lies ahead. It is rather the easiest part for the student: imitation part
Lab sessions and homework assignments provide practice. They design, write, debug and run programs. This is difficult, it is the bitterest: experience part
How about the noblest, the reflection part?

4. Our inspiration: Reflection in learning
Help students set their own learning goals, and monitor their progress in achieving them
Employ a “metacognitive” or “learn from your learning” approach
Ultimately, students are equipped to develop the ability to take control of their own learning

5. Implementation of our approach
Background
Discuss with students, at the beginning of the semester:
the benefits of learning one-on-one, Socratic method
the way brain works: repetition and reflection
the limits of lecture-style teaching
the need for self-monitoring in their learning

6. Implementation of our approach, cont
What we did
students complete sequence of questionnaires associated with each homework and midterm exam
collective answers, for each questionnaire, are reviewed in class weekly
at the end of the semester, each student received all her answers

7. Typical Questionnaire
Perceived level of difficulty of the homework/exam
Time spent: Thinking; Programming; Testing/Documenting
What did you learn by doing this homework?
What you wish you knew before starting this assignment?
What would you like to explore further?
Collaboration: Did you collaborated? Was it helpful?

8. Results Overall satisfaction with the course (SEQs)
Change in confidence, according to their own perception

9. Our CS2 setting JAVA is the programming language
Lectures: taught by Professor, twice a week
Labs run by Lab Instructor: smaller groups, once a week
Weekly homework assignments, 3 midterm exams, and one final project
Collaboration in assignments is encouraged, while it is required for the final project

10. Implementation Details
We used Google Forms, to:
share the Questionnaire with the class
collect students responses, and
present summary of them to the class
Here is a questionnaire with sample responses
The Exam questionnaire is a little different
Here is an actual class presentation of answers

11. Resources required Minimal amount of resourses are required!
On the instructor’s part:
an hour to create the questionnaire at the beginning of the semester
a few minutes per week to process the data, and produce the charts to share with the class
a few minutes per student to collect her data answers over the semester, and send the personal

12. Resources required cont…
On the student’s part:
about 5 minutes per week to type the answers the questions
of course, there is the time for reflection…
time well-spent!

13. Any Extras? One can add questions on other points of interest
We collected info on collaboration
Collaboration can be encouraged through sharing with the class their own comments
Three fourths of the students had a “great experience” collaborating in their final project, while no one found collaboration “less than helpful”

14. Conclusions
Reflection, an important part in learning, is underutilized in CS courses
Our system offers a way to encourage students reflect on, and learn from, their own learning
Easy and quick to be set up and administered by the professor, while it requires minimum overhead on the student’s part
Homework questionnaire
Exam questionnaire