will be able to make more informed decisions in the future. Currently students do not have exposure to CS at second level and any exposure, be it positive or negative for students, can contribute to informed decisions about choice of third-level courses. CS has one of the highest drop-out and non-continuation rates across all third-level subjects [77] and so if students find out that they don’t like studying CS or are not
suited to it then this is valuable.
5.4 practical lessons learned from the pilot study
5.4
p r a c t i c a l l e s s o n s l e a r n e d f r o m t h e p i l o t s t u d yOne of the main aims of the pilot study was to learn what obstacles there could be to teachers using the content and whether the lessons would translate well from the lesson plans to the classrooms. The feedback previously presented along with the experience of teaching it influenced changes and adaptions to various lessons. In this section we will look at some of those practical lessons learned from the teaching experience.
5.4.1
at t e n d a n c eDue to the fact that TY students were involved in the study, a problem arose in relation to inconsistent attendance. TY is a programme in which students are encouraged to try out new subjects, engage in new activities and pursue extra-curricular activities. This makes it a perfect fit for trialling a Computer Science course. However, extra- curricular and other activities can disrupt class attendance which in turn can impact in a negative way on programming lessons. Programming is a skill that is learned incrementally and so students who miss lessons will need to catch up as the topics and tools taught in each lesson are vital to the next phase of learning.
5.4.2
f a c i l i t i e sTwo rooms were used for the duration of this study. The first was an open-spaced room with movable chairs and tables. This was a perfect location for the concept lessons which involved individual pen and paper activities as well as group activities. The classroom structure was also beneficial for active learning and student-led activi- ties; it was set up with tables allowing groups of four students to sit around and work either together or in two pairs on most activities. From our experience this kind of group work is both enjoyable and promotes learning, though students took a while to adapt to the sequence of teaching employed in the course. In general, this involved a brief introduction followed by group, pair or individual work. Several comments were made in feedback forms to the effect that students enjoyed the interactive nature and group work.
The second room used for the study was a computer room with roughly 20 com- puters. These were older machines which meant several of them crashed during the lessons and lost internet connection on occasion. Also, there was no screen and no
5.5 conclusions
wall for projecting onto, so we could not show students how to use Scratch, create an account, or navigate to tutorials. These flaws were mentioned by students who would have appreciated a better introduction to Scratch. Considering our experience of this course, or any similar course that includes programming, it is important that good- quality facilities are made available. Primarily this means students having one-to-one access to a personal computer with fast internet access and the memory and process- ing capability required to run multiple software programs. Projectors or TV monitors which allow teachers to show students examples and "live-code" are also necessary to make the teaching experience easier for both students and educators.
5.4.3
c l a s s t i m eInstruction time was limited to one 40-minute class and one 35-minute class per week, separated by a lunch break. This meant that many students did not have an oppor- tunity to complete as much of the Scratch course as they would have liked. Another issue was that with the break, and students returning late, the second lesson was often reduced to 30 minutes. This, combined with the need to fill out a feedback form at the end of each lesson/class, reduced instruction time considerably. This, in turn, meant that a few exercises were not tested. All things considered, however, the experience was beneficial as we have changed our approach to lesson plans for teachers in the final course that was developed. All lessons in the completed course were designed with enough content to last for one hour for schools that have hour-long classes, but will allow schools with shorter classes to remove certain (optional) activities whilst including the more core parts of the course.
5.5
c o n c l u s i o n s5.5.1
ov e r a l l r e s p o n s e t o t h e c o u r s eWhile the overall feedback from students was positive, we were aware that consid- erable work was required to prepare for the delivery of Computer Science courses in schools and the integration of CT into other subjects. As a result of the study, we altered various lessons and fine tuned modules such as Scratch to ensure that the materials developed are sufficiently challenging, interesting for students, and age- appropriate. This ensure that when the main study, described in Chapter 6, was
5.5 conclusions
conducted the content was improved. This will be a continual process as lessons are developed and taught and feedback is gained from students and teachers.
5.5.2
p e r f o r m a n c e o n t h e p r o b l e m s o lv i n g t e s tAs noted in Section 5.3.4, students on average scored slightly lower on the second
problem solving test compared to the first. Although not statistically significant this was of course a disappointing result. We believe that several factors might have led to this; one is the sporadic attendance of students as discussed in Section5.4.1. Another
reason could have been due to the length of time that the study was delivered in. It has been shown that introducing CT to students can take time and so the short amount of time given may not have been sufficient to significantly impact their CT skills. It should also be noted that although the course includes lots of activities which are designed to improve problem solving skills the students are not "trained" on Bebras problems, so they may not necessarily improve in this test environment with the short time period given. The need for a larger scale study had already been noted and this is described in detail in Chapter6.
Part III
6
S C H O O L S S T U D Y
6.1
i n t r o d u c t i o nWith the course content largely developed and a Pilot Study having been successfully undertaken in spring of 2017 (as described in Chapter5), the next phase was to enlist
other teachers and classes to use the content. This would allow for more feedback and data to analyse the course’s impact and usefulness in Irish schools.
6.1.1
pa r t i c i pa n t i n f o r m at i o nThe hope for this study was to have around 100 students taught components of the CS2Go course and to receive feedback from them, their teachers and have the students complete the major assessments described in Chapter4. In some regards this goal was
reached, but in general it became clear that it would not be entirely possible in this iteration of the project for several reasons which are discussed in Section6.4.1.
Overall, students in 7 schools participated in some part of the study e.g. filling out surveys or taking the CT test. It is known from conversations with other educators and teachers that the content has been used more widely. These students come from a variety of different settings including mixed sex, all-boy and all-girl schools, large public schools, smaller private schools and schools in urban areas along with some in more rural settings. The previous CS experience of the various teachers also varied with some having qualifications in CS and vast experience teaching, whilst others had limited knowledge. Some taught several lessons and completed feedback, others just did some of the major parts of the assessment and one or two lessons, others were control groups and others took part in classes without filling out the major assessment parts described in Chapter4.
It is known from anecdotal conversations that more teachers and classes used the course and the content throughout the year (using Schoology). Over 80 educators were given access to the content throughout the year. The hope is that in future this will be more controlled and structured but for now we present the data gathered.
6.2 class feedback
One thing to note is that for the View of CS survey and Computational Thinking Assessment, students took these tests at a variety of times and environments. Students also may have used classes developed in this course recently, or not for months and may or may not have done a large amount of other CS related content. All the results then cannot be attributed to the course, whether negative or positive, but instead show a representative of the whole years growth. Exceptions to this include the comparison of the control and study groups as well as the two classes in the same year group.
6.2
c l a s s f e e d b a c kIn this section we will look at the general feedback received from both students and teachers on the developed lessons. This will include a general enjoyment level de- termined by a Likert scale (1-5), multiple-choice questions as well as quotes from students on what they liked and felt they learned during the lesson. Due to the num- ber of responses and their length, a small subsection of quotes will be presented with the hopes of showing a balanced yet representative view of each class.
6.2.1
c o m p u t e r s c i e n c e c o n c e p t sThis was the first module designed and is recommended as the starting point for teach- ing the course. The "unplugged" or "computer-less" nature of these activities can also be appealing as some schools suffer from a lack of equipment to allow whole classes to do lessons on programming or other computer-based topics. This allows teachers to be more flexible when planning out their schedules around booking computer rooms and other such practicalities. These lessons are described in more detail in Section
3.4.1.
As previously discussed in Chapter4, most lessons had an associated feedback form
for both teachers and students. With this module there are some questions common to all feedback forms, and some unique to each form. The common questions include the question "Did you enjoy this class?"; students are then asked to rate this on a Likert scale from one to five, with one being they really did not enjoy the class and five being that they really enjoyed the class. A number of these lessons also included multiple-choice questions on the topics covered. These are designed to quickly sample if students retain any information shown to them during the lesson. These questions are unique to each topic and so differ from form to form, the results of these are
6.2 class feedback
presented in all cases. The following section presents the results grouped by the class they were associated with.
Introduction to Computer Science
Table6.1 presents the overall high level feedback in relation to the class entitled "In-
troduction to Computer Science". It can be seen that this lesson was well received by students with an average rating of 3.51 out of 5. Almost 70% of students said they felt like they learned something during this class.