Encouraging Student Practice Using Nudge Theory Recommendations During Study and Struggle

摘要

Learning CS can be a challenging endeavor, complete with issues stemming from a student's technical knowledge to their understanding of concepts. As part of this dissertation, I will include a literature review covering the need for Computer Scientists, several learning theories associated with learning CS, instructional methods for practice, and several commonly used exercise types used while learning CS. As part of this work, I will explore the benefits of novel exercises types used while learning Computer Science. This includes 'typing exercise' and the benefits observed from lower level practice in a CS2 course. Each exercise type can also align to the different modalities of the ICAP Framework, an instructional methodology which assesses the level of engagement for a learning activity. Through this framework, students were shown to regularly practice with 'activity silos', in which their practice sessions were primarily only utilizing one ICAP modality. When students did shift modes, it was often to 'upgrade' to the next highest modality and never 'downgrade'. This can be problematic for a struggling student, since those lower-level exercises were shown to benefit students' course performance. Further, the activities selected by students can be indicative of their future course performance.Thus in order to encourage students to engage in these lower-level exercises, I developed a method using deliberate practice and nudge theory to encourage additional practice by 'upgrading' or 'downgrading' student practice sessions based on their current behaviors. Students that are successfully completing activities without struggle are encouraged to attempt more engaging exercises, which have been shown to produce higher leveling gains. However, when a student falters, or struggles, in these higher engagement activities, then they will be encouraged to attempt lower engagement activities. Unfortunately, these recommendations were largely ignored by students. However, when I compared their next activity, students almost immediately would switch to a new exercise after ignoring the nudge. The rationale for the behavior was collected through student surveys asking why they had chosen a particular exercise. However similar to the recommendations, students often ignored these surveys as their courses progressed. When students responded to surveys, it was often to state that they were simply following the list of available exercises. The behaviors and justifications from this work present insights on students' perceptions of practice, reactions to nudges while they are making mistakes, as well as reasons for selecting a particular activity. Students' selection frequency and time on task were then collected and evaluated on their ability to predict course performance and final course status. While their practice was useful for predicting course completion in a professional development program, the models struggled with courses that included graded course materials outside the scope of this research.Finally, I present recommendations for refining concepts like 'succeeding' and 'struggling' in a particular exercise type, suggestions to improve the exercises, and steps for developing a recommendation engine that can provide students with deliberate practice that best benefits their current skill set.