Study and Analysis on the Student Response System Adoption: Experimentation in a Programming Course

Abstract

Understanding the impact of different types of questions on learning is still an open problem in the literature. Many tools allow teachers to ask different kinds of questions, such as closed (multiple-choice, true/false, associations, etc.) and open (tag clouds, short notes). Our work aims to compare the effect of open and closed questions on student learning. To analyse the differences in learning results between the two types of question approaches, we carried an experiment in a Programming course (Programming 1 - Italian academic course in a Bachelor of Computer Science degree), dividing the students into two groups. During the first half of the course, we asked multiple-choice questions to the students in the first group, whereas we used an open-ended approach for the students of the second one. In the second part of the course, we inverted the modalities. For this work, carried out in the 2018/19 academic year, we used Mentimeter as Student Response System (SRS). We believe that identifying the right balance between explanation and verification and understanding the effects of the different evaluation types represent a significant contribution to the debate on formative evaluation in complex contexts. This contribution could be helpful in university classrooms where the high number of students does not allow easy interaction. Thanks to the data analysis and relative charts presented in this work, the authors share the learned lesson and offer several discussion points raising new questions that have to be addressed yet.