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by visiblink 1805 days ago
If you follow through the links, you'll find this: https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.14-02-0023

It's actually got a table of teaching practices, which they presumably want to see. I went through them and it looks like good stuff to me. I do a lot of it, though some wouldn't fit my (non-CS) discipline well.

1 comments

I was hoping for something more CS specific as that list seems to all be fairly generic pedagogy; it's been known for a long time e.g. that quizzes help memory formation and that more immediate feedback aids learning.

One thing they mention that I think is a problem with CS is:

> connect with student prior knowledge and beliefs

I do not know how do do this in a group larger than about 6-8 (I'd say 2 pizza rule, but you need more than 2 pizzas to feed 8 college students :)

In particular since much computer related learning prior to joining a college level CS class is some combination of: informal, self-taught, and/or poorly taught. This leads to a very wide variety of prior knowledge and beliefs, most of which are subtly wrong in important ways.

In a small group it's trivial to address these as they come up, but I can't imagine trying to anticipate them for a larger group.

I switched to CS from Physics and immediately noticed this difference. At first I just thought it was because physics classes were smaller, but I had no classes with less than 10 people. Then I realized that there just wasn't that much variety in the misbeliefs my physics peers held; partly because we had fairly similar backgrounds (most had taken AP Physics in High School, and had read a selecton from a fairly small pool of pop-science physics books).

I'd actually be interested in seeing a taxonomy of specific misbeliefs in CS (or really any field). Such a summary would probably aid teachers as well; most good teachers will have an intuition for the categories, but organizing and naming things can help one think in a more structured way about them.

Not, computer science, but Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" covers exactly that: folklore that has mutated into fact. 10x programmers, the cost of change curve and more. Terrific read.

https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

I noticed that the pedagogical ideas were fairly generic too. That's why they work for me when I'm in a completely different discipline.

I think that taxonomy is a great idea. Maybe it's something that could be developed inside a department with a wiki?