Better Understanding Fundamental Computer Science Concepts Through Peer Review

Abstract

Computer science courses, like many others, encompass subjects that are difficult to understand for students. Reflection on these subjects seems to be important for gaining a better understanding of complex and fundamental concepts in informatics. This paper presents a didactical setting that aims at fostering understanding of such hard subjects. In particular, the evolution of this didactical setting started out from combining ten-minute papers, peer review, and bonus scores. The combination of these didactical elements has been employed in an introductory computer science course that covers, among other things, several topics from theoretical computer science. The paper presents the detailed setup of the learning setting and its underlying goals as well as how it evolved over several years. Furthermore, the paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the approach, both from the perspective of students and the perspective of instructors. Evaluation also yields data that expose differences between different versions of the approach. Furthermore, evaluation data also support a critical analysis of potential success and risk factors with respect to the efficacy of the approach, in particular the type of problem statement, the motivation for providing proper feedback, and the role of bonus scores. Overall, the learning setting yields encouraging results, yet offers various options for refinements in future work.