– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles 2 Stephan Krusche Jürgen Börstler Bernd Bruegge Andreas Seitz Chair for Applied Software Engineering Technical University of Munich
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Traditional courses with large classes 3 Educator Lecture Exercise Student Delay (week)
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Interactive learning 5 delay (min) Delay (min) Educator Theory Student Exercise Interactive class ➡ Multiple iterations in one class
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Interactive learning 6 Exercise Example Solution Learner Reflection Theory “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand. Step back and I will act.” — Chinese Proverb Immediate feedback Definition: Educators teach and exercise small chunks of content in short cycles. They provide immediate feedback so that learners can reflect on the content and increase their knowledge incrementally.
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Exercises Individual exercises • E1 Quizzes with multiple choice questions • E2 Tutorials with step by step instructions • E3 Coding challenges to solve programming assignments • E4 Modeling exercises Team exercises • E5 Project work (including communication and collaboration aspects) ➡ (Semi-) automatic correction reduces the effort of the instructor 7
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Hypotheses • H1 Participation: Interactive learning increases the participation of students in classes. • H2 Improved Learning: Interactive learning leads to an improved learning experience for students. • H3 Scalability: Interactive learning is scalable to large classes with 300 students. 12
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Evaluation 1) Qualitative evaluation with an online survey in POM • July 2015 (directly after the course) • Goal: Find out if students improved their skills and if they are confident to apply the learned concepts in future projects • Response rate: 223 out of 294 (76%) 2) Quantitative evaluations in POM and PSE • Goal: Measure the correlation between exercise participation and final exam grade using a χ2 test 14
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Finding 1: students perceive to improve their skills 15 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% In the exercises, I was able to improve my skills in agile methods I am confident to apply agile methods in my next team project 2.6% 3.1% 9.3% 11.9% 88.1% 85.1% Agree Neutral Disagree ➡ Similar results for other taught topics
– Increasing Student Participation through Shorter Exercise Cycles Conclusion about interactive learning • Tighter integration of lectures and exercises leads to interactive classes • Higher participation in classes than in traditional courses • Highly significant correlation between exercise participation and final exam grade • Scalable and applicable to large classes without increasing teaching effort significantly • Future work: • More studies to investigate other influencing variables • Apply interactive learning in online courses (MOOCs) ➡ Want to adopt this approach? Talk to me or send me a mail: [email protected] ➡ More information on www.interactive-learning.org 18