Improving the formative and summative assessment of novice computer programmers : final report.
Course experience questionnaire responses have, over many years, shown consistently low levels of student satisfaction in Australian IT degrees. Retention rates in IT courses are also relatively poor. Traditional approaches to teaching programming are driving many students away from one of the most...
| Institutions: | University of Technology, Sydney Monash University University of Southern Queensland University of Sydney University of Sydney Queensland University of Technology |
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , |
| Publié: |
Australian Learning and Teaching Council
2010
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| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | /resources/PP6-48%20UTS%20Lister%20Report%202010.pdf |
| Résumé: | Course experience questionnaire responses have, over many years, shown consistently low levels of student satisfaction in Australian IT degrees. Retention rates in IT courses are also relatively poor. Traditional approaches to teaching programming are driving many students away from one of the most important disciplines of the 21st century. First year computer programming courses are traditionally assessed in three ways: (1) via de contextualised 'laboratory' problems, (2) via a small number of programming assignments, and (3) via an end-of-semester exam. The marking of these assessment items is usually done manually by teaching staff. Manual marking is time consuming. It greatly reduces the time available for teachers to help the students to learn. The assignments and exams are primarily summative, and frequently offer little timely formative feedback to students. Also, programming classes tend to be large, and much of the design of the assessment tasks is driven by concerns about the marking burden on the teachers, rather than the quality of the student learning experience. This project carried out further development on two tools designed to improve the formative and summative assessment of students learning to program computers. One of the tools, Reflect, develops the reflective skills of the students, by providing a framework in which students assess their own programming. In the course of this project, a Reflect add-on for the Moodle learning management system was developed. The other tool, ELP, provides online programming exercises that can be both manually and semi-automatically assessed. In the course of this project, ELP was re-structured to use open source web 2.0 toolkits, which make ELP completely web based, enabling programming exercises to be undertaken by students from anywhere and on practically any kind of computer, even an iPhone. [Executive summary, ed] |
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| ISBN: | 9781921856242 9781921856242 |
