| 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. |
https://leanpub.com/leprechauns