Making Lemonade:Exploring the Bright Side of Large Classes

Steve WolfmanUW CS&E Educational Technology Group

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Course Description

• CSE142: Intro to Programming I– 400 students total (final)– two parallel sections– service + feeder course

• Spring ’01 reviews top 10% in eng (including small/advanced classes)

Making Lemonade:Exploring the Bright Side of Large Classes

Steve WolfmanUW CS&E Educational Technology GroupMen… go mad in herds,

while they only recover their senses slowly,

and one by one.– Charles McKay

Anything you can do in a large class

you can do better in a small one.– Phil Wankat

(attributed by Richard Felder)

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Key Points:What you will walk away believing

• Large classes have valuable properties.

• Instructors and students can turn these properties to pedagogical advantage.

• Corollary: SIGCSE should explore ways to exploit these properties.

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Raw material

Large classes are big, and so…• they are diverse.

– wide range of ideas and backgrounds– upper tails

• they have substantial staff resources.– amortized effort– staff diversity

• they engender a crowd atmosphere.– the “madness of the crowds”

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“Large classes are big”can be an advantage

Human algorithms: binary tree simulation– scale of the class is intuitively “big” to

students– result shows a property of binary trees

– active, sensing, inductive (Felder)– sensio-motor learning experience (Piaget)

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Diversity can be an advantage

Class discussions: “Let’s Make a Deal”– diversity of

• …opinion (positive) conflict• …background different reasoning strategies

– result:• meta-cognition (on reasoning process) • reflection on what makes a “faithful” simulation

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The “Upper Tails” can be an advantage

The “upper tails” are the set of students that greatly exceed the mean for some measure…

These students can improve the whole class– “early adopters”: refine assignments– vocal students: spark discussion– top students: inspire others

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t• Homework infrastructure

• Shared section materials

• Open labs

• The “CSE142 Library”

• Study sessions

• Debugger tutorial

Amortized staff resources can be an advantage

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The “madness of the crowds”can be an advantage

• The first day hand-raising [Klionsky] (or song or shout…)

• Game shows– Let’s make a deal problem– Towers of Hanoi– Money in envelopes

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Methods to use these advantages

• Perspective• Awareness• Informing students• Individualized work (or extra credit [Roberts])• Public opportunities to share work [Roberts]• Group action to overcome habits [Klionsky]

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We have a responsibility to explore the bright side of large classes

Large class sizes are a fact for at least the near future in introductory CS courses.

“Lemonade” techniques have potential to enhance learning in large classes.

, the CS education community has a responsibility to explore these techniques.

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Key points not in this talk

• Individual innovative techniquesMany techniques in this talk are not

innovative.

• Statistically significant measuresMea culpa: let’s test them now!

• How much better are small classes?Not relevant once you’re already slated to

teach a large class.

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Challenge

Codify and evaluate a positive pedagogy of large courses — through design of classroom techniques — that will

complement the existing pedagogy and enhance student learning.

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Acknowledgments

Martin Dickey, CSE142 staff and students, CSE326 staff and students, Richard Anderson, Mike Ernst, Andy Garland, David Kay, Rachel Pottinger, Jacob and Shelley Wolfman, and CSE590ET.

This work was supported in part by an Intel Foundation Graduate Fellowship.