Peer assessment, as a form of collaborative learning, can engage students in active learning and improve their learning gains. However, current teaching platforms and programming environments provide little support to integrate peer assessment for in-class programming exercises. We identified challenges in conducting such exercises and adopting peer assessment through formative interviews with instructors of introductory programming courses. To address these challenges, we introduce PuzzleMe, a tool to help Computer Science instructors to conduct engaging in-class programming exercises. PuzzleMe leverages peer assessment to support a collaboration model where students provide timely feedback on their peers' work. We propose two assessment techniques tailored to in-class programming exercises: live peer testing and live peer code review. Live peer testing can improve students' code robustness by allowing them to create and share lightweight tests with peers. Live peer code review can improve code understanding by intelligently grouping students to maximize meaningful code reviews. A two-week deployment study revealed that PuzzleMe encourages students to write useful test cases, identify code problems, correct misunderstandings, and learn a diverse set of problem-solving approaches from peers.
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Supporting Instructors Adoption of Peer Instruction
Peer Instruction (PI) is a lecture-based active learning approach that
has students solve a difficult multiple-choice question individually,
submit their answer, discuss their answer with peers, and then
submit their answer again. Despite plentiful evidence to support
its effectiveness, PI has not been widely adopted by undergraduate
computing instructors due to low awareness of PI, the effort needed
to create PI questions, the limited instructional time needed for
PI activities during lectures, and potential adverse reactions from
students.
We hypothesized that we could allay some of these concerns
by hosting a three-day summer workshop on Peer Instruction for
instructors and building and sharing a free tool and a question bank
that supports PI in an open-source ebook platform. We invited
eighteen instructors to attend an in-person three-day workshop
on PI in the summer of 2022. We collected their feedback by using
pre and post surveys and conducting semi-structured interviews.
We report on the effect of the three-day summer workshop on
instructor attitudes towards and knowledge of PI, the barriers that
prevented instructors from adopting the free tool, and feedback
from instructors who used the tool.
The results show that most workshop attendees reported that
they planned to use the tool in the fall semester, but less than
half actually did. Responses from both users and non-users yield
insights about the support instructors need to adopt new tools. This
research informs future professional development workshops, tool
development, and how to better support instructors interested in
adopting Peer Instruction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2043207
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10510820
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2
- ISBN:
- 9798400704246
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1662 to 1663
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland OR USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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