Comments on: How do we encourage retention of knowledge in computing?

By: Cecily

Cecily — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:36:25 +0000

I make my students do a final project presentation on the last day of class. The first semester, they kind of didn’t say too much, so the second semester I had them all answer a few questions. This has been a great “reflection” activity for most of them after writing their first serious piece of code. They seem to learn a lot, and it is interesting to hear the vastly different lessons they learn from the same assignment(e..g I learned I want to be a CS major(instead of a math major) vs. I learned I do NOT want to be a CS major(instead of a math major). They also tell what the hardest part was, what they learned(how important sequencing code is, when to ask for help, importance of mentors, etc.)

By: mrstevesscience

mrstevesscience — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 21:46:54 +0000

Agree with Katrina reflection is the key and I like your idea of asking the kids to write down advice for someone who just started. Does anyone else have any suggestions to get kids in the habit of reflection?

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By: katrinafalkner

katrinafalkner — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 23:46:59 +0000

I think reflection, as you state above, is the key here – getting students to think about what they learnt from what they have just completed. One thing we have been doing is to get our students who have just completed first year to start writing down advice for someone just starting – what would they do differently if they were to start again, and what is the most important thing that they have discovered from their experiences. While this has already been interesting, I’d like to expand this further to have our students do this as a regular activity – and sharing this knowledge with others is a strong motivator.

By: gasstationwithoutpumps

gasstationwithoutpumps — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:27:55 +0000

I think that what is needed is more along the lines of a writing course: after the assignment is turned in and feedback added, students get it back to improve. Going through several drafts of the program until it is good (as opposed to marginally functional) would be a major change for most CS classes.

By: gasstationwithoutpumps

gasstationwithoutpumps — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:26:10 +0000

Yes, I believe that typing is just as effective as hand writing for building retention, and it is less likely to cause writer’s cramp.

By: Bri Morrison

Bri Morrison — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 21:42:53 +0000

Given a lot of students today, I wonder if the results are any different if they *type* down what they remember versus writing it down (physically, pen and paper old school style). Maybe I’m just old (or old-school) but I do believe there’s something to the “in the ear, use the hand to put to paper, remembered by the brain”. And I just don’t know about typing…same internal memory triggers?

By: guy

guy — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:26:20 +0000

I have a little more time today, and after revisiting my copy of How to Solve It, I thought that I should have included a bit from the text.

First, all four phases: (1) understanding the problem, (2) devising a plan, (3) carrying out the plan, and (4) looking back.

Even though Polya’s book is about solving math problems, his phases can be applied to introductory programming exercises. Here is his first paragraph of the description of the “looking back” phase.

Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the
solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument,
shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they
miss an important and instructive phase of the work. By
looking back at the completed solution, by reconsidering and
reexamining the result and the path that led to it, they could
consolidate their knowledge and develop their ability to solve
problems. A good teacher should understand and impress on
his students the view that no problem whatever is completely
exhausted. There remains always something to do; with
sufficient study and penetration, we could improve any
solution, and, in any case, we can always improve our
understanding of the solution.

He then follows this with more that in introductory programming would be testing/verifying the solution and even examining the elegance of the solution (i.e., can the solution be reduced, made clearer, …).

So, yes… students reflecting on what they have just done, maybe as comments in their code, is probably very valuable…

By: guy

guy — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:22:49 +0000

1945, How to Solve It, G. Polya

The final step: Looking Back – Examine the solution obtained…

and, regarding comments, I find that promoting very meaningful procedure and variable names to be more important than comments, unless the comments bring to light stuff that’s not obvious in the code.

By: Mark Guzdial

Mark Guzdial — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 01:04:14 +0000

I used to teach really large classes (150-300). I never meant for any assignment to be solvable by a random walk in code space. With that many students, some students will try. I confused the point by mentioning that. My main point is that students learn something, from some process (even if random), when programming. If not, why did we make the assignment at all? How do we get students to retain the knowledge they just gained? I agree that writing comments is one form of reflection -- if you write them after the code. Retention comes from reflection, from practice, from revisiting ideas. If you give several programming assignments that address the same learning objectives, then absolutely -- that is likely to work for achieving retention. If not, what else do we do? I'm raising the issue in this post. There is little empirical data about retention in computer science. Most SIGCSE Symposium or ICER papers don't measure learning at all, let alone retention some time later. Lauren's paper is one of the few. I suspect that it is likely that most of us don't do anything explicitly to encourage retention, and whatever we are doing, there is probably little empirical evidence that it works.