The Combination Approach: Increasing Student Learning and Understanding of Introductory Computer Science Topics.

One of the key components to an introductory Computer Science course is the lab component. This serves as a time for students to gain hands on experience with the concepts they are learning in lecture that week. Typically, the way the lab time is structured is students will be given the assignment and be allotted the entire lab period to work on their own with instructor help available if need be. While straightforward enough, this approach is less than ideal. With lab sizes in introductory courses increasing the number of students who need instructor help during the lab time increases. This approach leads to students not being able to get the attention they need as the instructor needs to move between students quickly or even worse...students may "fall through the cracks" as demand for help outpaces the instructor resources available. The result is students leaving lab with knowledge gaps regarding the topic that prevent them from creating a solid foundation on which to build their basic programming knowledge. Even worse is the fact this approach teaches students when they are handed a programming task to dive straight to code as fast as possible which may not be consistent with how they will work in industry. The goal of this paper is to outline a new paradigm for structuring the lab period which teaches students how to work with peers to solve a problem, think before they code, and build conceptual understanding. In this approach students do a combination of group work, individual work, and whole class work to solve the problem. This allows the instructor to better manage the students in the class and enables them to point out common "pain points" with the material being covered that week and show ways to optimize / speed up the code being written. This paper discusses the effectiveness of this approach by looking at qualitative student feedback as well as analyzing the student performance (grades) across sections of the class that had this new, combination approach versus the normal approach to lab of giving students the lab and having them work independently. The initial statistical analysis (difference in means, 95% confidence level) shows a statistically significant increase in lab, homework, and overall course grades for students that experienced the new, combination approach when compared to the students that experienced the normal approach to the computer science lab experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]