Purpose In response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have transitioned to online instruction. With learning promising to be online, at least in part, for the near future, instructors may be thinking of providing online collaborative learning opportunities to their students who are increasingly isolated from their peers because of social distancing guidelines. This paper aims to provide design recommendations for online collaborative project-based learning exercises based on this research in a software engineering course at the university level. Design/methodology/approach Through joint work between learning scientists, course instructors and software engineering practitioners, instructional design best practices of alignment between the context of the learners, the learning objectives, the task and the assessment are actualized in the design of collaborative programming projects for supporting learning. The design, first segments a short real-time collaborative exercise into tasks, each with a problem-solving phase where students participate in collaborative programming, and a reflection phase for reflecting on what they learned in the task. Within these phases, a role-assignment paradigm scaffolds collaboration by assigning groups of four students to four complementary roles that rotate after each task. Findings By aligning each task with granular learning objectives, significant pre- to post-test learning from the exercise as well as each task is observed. Originality/value The roles used in the paradigm discourage divide-and-conquer tendencies often associated with collaborative projects. By requiring students to discuss conflicting ideas to arrive at a consensus implementation, their ideas are made explicit, thus providing opportunities for clarifying misconceptions through discussion and learning from the collaboration.
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Collaborative Reflection “in the flow” of Programming: Designing Effective Collaborative Learning Activities in Advanced Computer Science Contexts
Designing activities for maximizing collaborative learning in advanced computer
science contexts is of broad interest. While programming exercises remain the dominant form
of pedagogy here, prior work showed that collaborative reflection over worked examples is as
good or even better for conceptual learning and future programming. This work used a “phased”
design, with separate collaborative reflection and programming phases, and varied the time
boundary between the two to determine their differential impact. A more effective design,
however, could involve collaborative reflection prompted “in the flow” of programming, with
benefits similar to self-explanation prompts interleaved into individual problem-solving. While
total time-on-task is the same, this “interleaved” design might allow learners to spend a larger
proportion of this time on reflection. Thus, this paper compares this novel interleaved approach
to the phased design. We determine that interleaving increases the proportion of time available
for reflection resulting in performance improvements on future programming.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10356434
- Editor(s):
- Jun Oshima, Toshio Mochizuki
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- General Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences 2022
- ISSN:
- 1573-4552
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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