Promoting Engagement in a CS1 Course with Assessment for Learning

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.1668

Keywords:

Assessment for Learning, Engagement, CS1, blended learning

Abstract

This practice report discusses the evolution of a CS1 Course taught at the University of Liège, Belgium. Over the last seven years several teaching activities have been thought to complement traditional theoretical courses and exercise sessions in order to promote students’ engagement. The result is aligned with (i) the principles of assessment for learning, which consists in leveraging the assessment to improve the students learning, and (ii) the concept of blended learning. This report describes the difficulties the students faced and what we implemented to assist our course evolution. We also present and discuss results showing that, despite a high drop-out rate, we managed to engage students to work on a regular basis and, in some cases, raise their performance levels.

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Author Biographies

Simon Liénardy, University of Liège

Simon Liénardy graduated as Civil Engineering in Computer Science in 2013.  He works as Teaching Assistant and Doctoral Student (under the supervision of Prof. B. Donnet) at the Institute Montefiore (Université de Liège) since 2013.  His research interest are in Computer Science Education, in particular CS1 courses and Graphical Loop Invariant Based Programming.  Simon is the main contributor of CAFÉ, a system  to automatically  assess and provide feedback to student’s work. 

Laurent Leduc, University of Liège

Dr Laurent Leduc is a Senior Researcher in Learning Sciences at the Institute for Training and Research in Higher Education at the University of Liège (ULiège). Since 2010, he is also in charge of its Centre de Didactique Supérieure - CDS - aiming to pedagogically support and train professors in charge of Freshmen, and the Scientific coordinator of the Feedback First-year Project - FFYP of the ULiège - aiming to promote and support the implementation of good teaching practices related to Assessment for Learning (AfL) and formative feedbacks in First Year courses. A Course Syllabus specialist, Leduc is author of the book Rédiger des Plans de cours. De la théorie à la pratique. 

Benoit Donnet, University of Liège

Dr. Prof. Benoit Donnet  received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2006 and has been a PostDoc until 2011 at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He joined the Montefiore Institute at the Université de Liège in 2011 where he was appointed successively as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor. His research interests are about Internet measurements (measurements scalability, Internet topology discovery, measurements applied to security), network modeling, middleboxes, new Internet architectures (LISP, Segment Routing), and Computer Science Education (focusing on CS1 course and programming learning).

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Published

2021-03-15

How to Cite

Liénardy, S., Leduc, L., & Donnet, B. (2021). Promoting Engagement in a CS1 Course with Assessment for Learning. Student Success, 12(1), 102–111. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.1668

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2021): Volume 12 Issue 1 2021

Section

Practice Reports

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Simon Liénardy, Laurent Leduc, Benoit Donnet

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International Licence (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.