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Peer learning in an introductory computer science course

Published: 12 March 1994 Publication History

Abstract

A problem in teaching large introductory computer science courses is to overcome the impersonality of the large lecture class and to provide more personal attention to individual students. Our approach is to use peer learning experiences to instill in students the need to take responsibility for their learning and for the learning of those around them. Recent work has shown that educational quality for students and productivity for faculty can be enhanced through use of peer-learning environments where students do not just learn and faculty do not just teach.
The novel aspects of our work are to apply group learning in a large introductory computer science class setting and to expect more responsibility on the part of students for their learning. In support of these goals we have introduced the use of upper-level undergraduate students to help facilitate student group interaction. In addition, we have developed software to minimize the administrative overhead of handling many groups and for students to electronically record group learning activities.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 26, Issue 1
March 1994
410 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/191033
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '94: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth SIGCSE symposium on Computer science education
    March 1994
    414 pages
    ISBN:0897916468
    DOI:10.1145/191029
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 advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 March 1994
Published in SIGCSE Volume 26, Issue 1

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