Overview

A major role for a university is to help students learn. Members of the Computer Science Education Research group collaborate to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of this process. We are committed to innovative pedagogy which takes a student-centred approach, founded on educational research. As IT experts, we seek new ways to use IT appropriately to support learners and teachers.

Teaching Systems

- Information Technology can assist students in their learning, by providing extra opportunities to see examples, practice skills, and get feedback.
- We seek to provide systems that are “intelligent”, for example, by adapting the material presented to the student’s current knowledge and interests. This requires the system to maintain a “student model”.

- It is important for any teaching system to be scrutable, that is, the student should be able to find out why the system behaves as it does. Student reflection is also encouraged by allowing the student to see the model that the system has built of their skills.

- A teaching system should also assist the teachers, by providing access to collective information about the state of understanding, and in particular about any common errors students are making.

- The development of these systems makes strong use of research expertise of members of our group in fields such as User-Adaptive Systems, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Adaptive Hypertext.

- See “Learner Control” by J. Kay in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, vol 11, no 1, 2001.

Active and Reflective Learners

- Educational theory suggests that student learning is enhanced when students are actively engaged in constructing meaning from the content and experiences, and when they pay attention to their own learning. We should encourage students to become partners in planning their study: they should be given explicit guidance on the concepts and skills they must master, and they should identify deficiencies and plan specific action (such as examining case studies, working on simple exercises, etc) to remedy these.

- Problem-Based Learning (discussed elsewhere on this poster) is a very direct attempt to get students participating in learning actively and reflectively. Even in courses with more conventional lecture/lab/assignment structures, we can take steps to encourage deep approaches to learning. For example, students can be given concept inventories, and asked to track which lab activities relate to each concept.

- See “Supporting Reflection in Introductory Computer Science” by A. Fekete, J. Kay, J. Kingston and K. Wimalaratne, in Proceedings of SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2000, published by ACM Press.

Scholarship of Teaching

- We are committed to pursuing educational innovation within a community of scholars devoted to improving student outcomes. We seek careful evaluation of the impact of innovative practices, through quantitative and qualitative studies, and through feedback from students and peers.

- Internationally, the community of scholars is mainly organised through SIGCSE, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education within the ACM.

- Our innovations are disseminated to the community through publication in the main conferences sponsored by SIGCSE, including the US-based Technical Symposium in Computer Science Education, the Europe-based Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, and the Australasian Computing Education Conference.

Problem-Based Learning

- Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an approach to professional education that has been widely used in Engineering, Medical and Health Science degrees. Its use in large-enrolment introductory programming classes was pioneered by members of this CS Education Research Group.

- A key aspect of PBL is that students should work in groups on authentic tasks, with learning driven by the needs of the task. In introductory programming these tasks are the creation of substantial software systems. For example, in the first semester unit, students who have never programmed before are required to build a system to perform a time-step simulation of a physical, biological or economic model. This drives them to learn about classes, methods, loops, etc. These tasks are too large for a student to complete alone, so improving communication and teamwork skills becomes essential for progress. Of course, working in a group also contributes to effective learning, since the students can support and critique one another.

- PBL expects each student to become a partner in planning their own learning. Extensive resources are provided for scaffolding, but each learner needs to decide which resources are most helpful for them, in their current state of knowledge. Students are asked to fill in a weekly diary, which records the plans of what to learn and how to learn it; this encourages reflection as each week’s outcome must be compared with the plan.

- Evaluation of the course shows that compared to conventional lecture/lab/assignment approaches, PBL does not detract from the students learning of technical content, and it enhances desirable affective outcomes and develops generic problem solving skills.

- See “Conveying Technical Content in a Curriculum Using Problem-Based Learning” by A. Fekete, T. Greening and J. Kingston, in Proceedings of Australasian Conference on Computer Science Education, 1998. See also “Problem-Based Learning for Foundation Computer Science courses” by M. Barg, K. Crawford, A. Fekete, T. Greening, O. Hollands, J. Kay and J. Kingston, in Computer Science Education, vol 10, no 2, 2000.