Encouraging Students in Large Classes Roy Andersson Department of Computer Science Lund Institute of Technology Lund University P.O. Box 118, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden Roy.Andersson @ cs. Ith.se Abstract Our experiences and results of encouraging our students in a large CS 1 course to keep up with the pace of the course at a reasonable cost for us are presented. We have successfully managed to pinpoint students who are about to fall into the anonymity and passivity trap and give them the extra attention they need to avoid the trap when they need it. Since we managed to pinpoint the most needing students we can give them the extra personal recognition and encouragement they need at a very reasonable cost in the perspective of the whole Course. For the two years we have tried our concept we can see a significant increase in the pass rate of the final exam. 1 Introduction Since the meaning of "a large class" is something that differs between different universities and lecturers we need to clarify our definition. In our world a large class is 100- 200 students, and the course we present in this paper is a CS1 course taking about 180 students. Problems with large classes are many and massive. "For students the dominant problems are anonymity and passivity. For staff the dominant problems are not being able to relate to students as individuals and being overwhelmed by the number of demands placed upon them." [6]. Linked to these problems are others such as negative effects on students' understanding of the subject [2], and a most likely higher drop out rate followed by the first year students' experiences of their anonymous situation in a large class [6]. Even though these problems are severe and present for all students, some of them seem to be experienced in a higher degree by the women than by the men [4], an important concern in a situation where more women are encouraged to study computer science. The Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advant -age and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE 2000 3/00 Austin, TX, USA © 2000 ACM 1-58113-213-1/00/0003-. $5.00 Torgny Rox~ Centre for Teaching and Learning Lund University P.O. Box 118, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden Torgny.Roxa @ upc.lu.se problem shows itself when it comes to drop out and to the learning outcome of those who remain in the system. This text describes how it is possible to deal with the core problem in large classes - the lack of interaction between students and their teacher - and how this can improve the pass rate at the end of the course. By focusing on the students at risk all along the course, the course leader can direct his attention, his teaching, where it is needed the most, and where it gives the highest payoff. The information needed to do this is gathered in different ways and the time to do this is bought by hiring an extra teaching assistant (TA), a fairly low cost compared to the positive effects on the pass rate of the course. In detail the lecturer, who is the head of the course, spends an average of two hours a week visiting the group exercises of the course. During these visits he simply walks around and talks to the students and TAs. The students feel recognized even if the lecturer, in average, spends less than one minute per student. The TAs are provided with weekly performance sheets where they write down their students' performance. These sheets are handed in to the lecturer after each exercise and they give an overview of who is on pace or not. This information is then used by the lecturer during his visits to spend some extra time with the students who are not on pace and encourage them. 2 Course Format The course is a typical CS1 course, for the moment offered in Pascal. We are giving the course as a service course to the School of Mechanical Engineering at Lund Institute of Technology, Lund, Sweden. They have. about 150-200 freshmen every year and this course is compulsory for all of them. The course is given as a one-semester course with a 20 percent workload and it is given during their very first semester at the School of Mechanical Engineering. Similar CS 1 courses are given as service courses to almost all non- computer science programs at the Lund Institute of Technology. There are only some minor differences between the courses offered to the different programs. In all, 600-700 students take these courses every year. The course format is: • 13 lectures (2 hours, 180 students). The lectures have the form of traditional lectures. 176• 3 seminars for beginners (2 hours, 100 students). The seminars are given in parallel with the three first lectures as support for those who never have been in touch with programming before. • 10 classroom exercises (2 hours, 16 students and 2 TAs). A small pen and paper problem set has to be fulfilled at each exercise. These exercises are compulsory and the students have to fulfill all the ten problem sets to be eligible for the final exam. • 5 computer lab exercises (2 hours, 24 students and 3 TAs). A small programming exercise has to be fulfilled individually at each lab. These labs are compulsory and the students have to fulfill all the five labs to be eligible for the final exam. • 2 individual programming projects. These projects are compulsory and the students have to fulfill them to be eligible for the final exam. • 1 final exam (no mid terms). A five hour exam on paper. The effort we put in with the seminars during the first three weeks of the course has two purposes. The most obvious purpose is to help those who never have been in touch with computers or programming to keep up with the lecture pace. As a bonus we can keep a "normal" pace at the lectures and avoid to completely bore those students who already know a little about programming. When we added the seminars to the
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