Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Malik, Ali, Woodrow, Juliette, Piech, Chris
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Malik, Ali
Woodrow, Juliette
Piech, Chris
author_facet Malik, Ali
Woodrow, Juliette
Piech, Chris
contents We propose and carry-out a novel method of formative assessment called Assessment via Teaching (AVT), in which learners demonstrate their understanding of CS1 topics by tutoring more novice students. AVT has powerful benefits over traditional forms of assessment: it is centered around service to others and is highly rewarding for the learners who teach. Moreover, teaching greatly improves the learners' own understanding of the material and has a huge positive impact on novices, who receive free 1:1 tutoring. Lastly, this form of assessment is naturally difficult to cheat -- a critical property for assessments in the era of large-language models. We use AVT in a randomised control trial with learners in a CS1 course at an R1 university. The learners provide tutoring sessions to more novice students taking a lagged online version of the same course. We show that learners who do an AVT session before the course exam performed 20 to 30 percentage points better than the class average on several questions. Moreover, compared to students who did a practice exam, the AVT learners enjoyed their experience more and were twice as likely to study for their teaching session. We believe AVT is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_14971
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment
Malik, Ali
Woodrow, Juliette
Piech, Chris
Computers and Society
We propose and carry-out a novel method of formative assessment called Assessment via Teaching (AVT), in which learners demonstrate their understanding of CS1 topics by tutoring more novice students. AVT has powerful benefits over traditional forms of assessment: it is centered around service to others and is highly rewarding for the learners who teach. Moreover, teaching greatly improves the learners' own understanding of the material and has a huge positive impact on novices, who receive free 1:1 tutoring. Lastly, this form of assessment is naturally difficult to cheat -- a critical property for assessments in the era of large-language models. We use AVT in a randomised control trial with learners in a CS1 course at an R1 university. The learners provide tutoring sessions to more novice students taking a lagged online version of the same course. We show that learners who do an AVT session before the course exam performed 20 to 30 percentage points better than the class average on several questions. Moreover, compared to students who did a practice exam, the AVT learners enjoyed their experience more and were twice as likely to study for their teaching session. We believe AVT is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams.
title Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14971