An approach to improving student retention in a programming course that is constructively aligned around automatic online assessment

Abstract

The principle of constructive alignment formulated by Biggs [Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment, Higher Education, 1996] has received considerable attention both among education practitioners and within the broader field of educational psychology. The principle states that the learning activities and the final assessment of a course should be designed in such manner that they directly correspond to the learning goals of the course. In this paper we report on our experiences from introducing automatic online assessment into a traditional C++ programming course in an increasingly constructively aligned manner. Initially the student retention rate dropped significantly: from 63 to 43%. In reaction to this, we introduced “learning by example”-style lab sessions to the course. As a result, the retention was raised back to 63% while still achieving, according to our subjective evaluation, better learning results than without automated assessment.