by Bob Werner
Dr. Carole Bagley, of UST’s QMCS Department, received a Bush Foundation re-grant to develop students’ thinking skills in an introductory Computer Science course, a course that the UST Business curriculum recommends for Business majors (QMCS 110 – Introduction to Information Processing). Evidence of the need to revise the course resulted from UST’s Career Services data and from CEOs in industry, who said that business students need to be able to diagnose problems and troubleshoot their own computers.
Carole reasoned that if students were given real-world computer problems, they would take more interest in the course, use the material more, and be able to reason through a diagnosis, a cure, and a future prevention of the problem. She devised a series of case studies and also had students identify their own computer problems. Carole then delivered instruction that enabled students to solve the problems in the case studies, and later in the course, to solve the problems they themselves encountered.
In the fall of 2004, Carole taught one section of the course using her new IBL strategy. Three other sections were taught in the traditional way. After the course, five pairs of faculty interviewed the students. Each faculty pair had one QMCS professor and one from the Bush grant committee. Our thinking was that the QMCS prof would understand the computer-science part, and that a Bush grant committee member would better understand the students’ general reasoning skills.
Fourteen students from the treatment section (IBL) and nine from the control section (traditional instruction) were randomly chosen from class lists. The students were given four computer problems, generated from IRT’s list of the most common calls to the computer help line. The students each had 15 minutes to study the problems, with their textbooks available. Then, each individual student was interviewed for 15 minutes by a faculty pair. The faculty was blind with respect to the type of instruction received, and the students were blind to who the instructors were).
The professors rated the students’ higher-order thinking skills with a pre-agreed rubric. I then took the results and calculated whether or not there was a difference among treatment and control groups. Using an independent-samples t test, p=.06. In other words, there are six chances in a hundred that the professors would have given the ratings they did, when in fact, there was no difference in the students’ reasoning skills. The results of this quasi-experiment confirm that students in sections where professors used IBL strategies had better general reasoning skills than students who had received traditional instruction.
I must stress that this is a quasi-experiment. We are unable to control for the effects that individual teachers may have in class, such as their level of energy, personality traits, etc., nor can we control for the time of day that the course is offered, or other factors that could explain the difference in ratings of thinking skills. We on the Bush committee look for convergent assessment measures. We don’t rely on any one measure, such as this quasi-experiment.
We on the Bush grant committee believe that the Philosophy and the QMCS experiments, together with educational literature, show that IBL can be used successfully in entry-level courses. In our bid for a Bush grant renewal for 2005-08, we will focus much of our effort supporting IBL in those entry-level courses.