A home-designed EVS was used in all the six sessions. The first session was an introductory class in C Programming. Thirty-three students attended the class. The question which was used to evaluate students’ understanding of the concepts that were covered in this class session is shown below.
Q1. Which of the following source codes would produce the output shown below?
Figure 5-1 below shows the results of students’ voting which was conducted at the end of an introductory lesson in the C Programming class.
Figure 5-1 EVS Results 1
The results of the votes showed that twenty out of thirty-three students, which represented 61% of the class chose option C, which was the correct answer. Thirteen students chose wrong alternatives. This feedback was shown to the students by projecting the results of voting. Although the answers were projected, the students were not told what the correct answer was. The idea behind showing the students how they voted was to enable each learner to check his or her response against the rest of the class. Afterwards, the students were asked to discuss the results for two minutes in pairs as buzz groups. This was done to encourage peer learning. After discussions, the students voted again secretly. This time, the percentage of students who chose the correct option rose from 64% to 94%, with only two who chose wrong alternatives. This finding may have suggested that the discussions (peer learning) had a positive effect on the students’ understanding of the topic. It is assumed that students were not biased towards the correct answer when they saw that majority had chosen option C. Each alternative of the multiple-choice question was discussed by the whole class why it was wrong or right before the class was dismissed. The results of the second voting session were as shown in Figure 5-2.
Figure 5-2 EVS Results 2
Session 2
A week later during the second lesson, the lecturer wanted to find out if the students still remembered what was covered in the first lesson. At the beginning of the lesson, he asked them to answer the same question he had asked them in the first lesson. Alternatives of the multiple-choice question were randomised. The findings showed that 95% of the students chose the correct answer. Still, 5% of the class chose the wrong option. The results prompted the lecturer to revise some important aspects of the lesson that had been covered in the earlier lesson prior to presenting the new material. He wanted those who did not understand the concepts to do so before he continued teaching. The second lesson was on Escape Sequences and Variables. However, the students did not vote at the end of the lesson because time had run out. This shows that proper lesson planning was required to incorporate EVS in class.
Session 3
The third lesson started by asking learners to answer three multiple choice questions using EVS. The first two questions were on Escape Sequence and the third one was on
Q1 Which source code will produce the output shown below?
The correct option for this question on was D. The students were given five minutes to go through each option and decide what the correct option was. The questions required students to do a dry run of each option in order to find the correct one. In all three questions, there were subtle differences between the correct option and incorrect alternatives. This required careful scrutiny by the students to identify the correct alternative. For the first question, the main difference among the multiple- choice alternatives was in the following printf statements:
The second question tested the same concept as the first question but the difference was that this time, the lecturer was interested in the newline sequence. The question was as follows:
The correct answer for this question was D.
The third question was testing the students’ mastery of the concept of variables. Here, the students needed to pay particular attention to detail otherwise they would easily have gotten the answer wrong. Question 3 was as follows:
Q3 Select the correct source code for program which asks a user to input two numbers and produces the sum of the two numbers as illustrated below:
The correct answer for this question was B. After students had voted on all questions, the results of voting were projected for the students to see and they were told what the correct answers were. For each question, the class discussed each alternative and reached a consensus on what was right or wrong with each option. This discussion served as an immediate feedback to each learner on their understanding of the
concepts. From the results in Figure 5-3 below, it could be argued that majority of the students had understood the concepts that were covered in this lesson.
Figure 5-3 EVS Session 3 results
Session 4
The fourth lesson was on Mathematical Functions and IF Statements. These exercises were given to students as a way of evaluating their understanding of the lessons. The results showed that many students had problems with Mathematical Functions and
Temperature Conversion but had a fairly good understanding of the concept of IF Functions. Students’ answers were discussed in class and misconceptions were
cleared. Basing on the results of the EVS, the lecturer decided to revise the concepts on Mathematical Functions to ensure that all the students were conversant with the topic. Their responses to the questions are summarised in Figure 5-4.
Figure 5-4 EVS Session 4 results Session 5
In this session, the lecturer wanted to get feedback from the students on how well they understood the lesson. He conducted a secret opinion poll at the end of the lesson in which students voted using the EVS. Figure 5-5 shows how the students responded when they were asked to rate their understanding of the lesson.
The results showed that majority (23 out of 33) of the students understood the lesson well. The researcher discussed students’ feedback with the lecturer. There was a concern that ten students had difficulties in understanding the lesson. These students needed help before they proceeded to the next lesson. The lecturer was particularly interested to know the students who did not understand the lesson so that they could be supported. However, it was difficult to identify the students because the voting was anonymous. Students voted anonymously to encourage them to provide responses without fear of reprisal from the lecturer. An announcement was made calling upon students who had problems to seek help from the lecturer.
Session 6
The sixth lesson was for revision. Students worked in pairs to answer thirty multiple- choice questions on pieces of paper which were then collected for analysis. They were given feedback on their performance the following day because the analysis took time. It was noted that the performance of all the pairs was excellent. The scores on the quiz ranged from 92% to 97%. When asked how they managed to get these very high scores, the students explained that they owed this to collaborative learning. They explained that they could not have achieved such high scores if they had worked individually.
The EVS concept was tried on secondary school students as well because it was noted that very few students were participating actively in class. The EVS sessions were done after school hours because they could not be fitted within class time as teachers wanted to cover the syllabus before government examinations. The following section describes the findings of an EVS that the researcher had designed as a prototype and tried out at two secondary schools, CDSS-2 and CSS-1.