Using CONSIDER, a Novel Approach to Conflict-Driven Collaborative-Learning, in a Programming Languages Classroom

Piaget’s classic work on how children learn showed that when learners engage in critical discussions with peers who have ideas that conflict with their own, that contributes effectively to their developing deep understanding of the concepts involved. Building on this foundation, we have developed a novel and powerful approach to collaborative learning that exploits the power of online technologies to enable CS – more generally, STEM– students to develop thorough understanding of technical topics through collaborative learning. Our approach, as we show, has a number of important advantages over most approaches to face-to-face collaborative learning. We have implemented a prototype web app, CONSIDER, based on our approach and used it in a Programming Languages course. It was very well received, with most of the students indicating, in a post-discussion survey, that the approach helped improve their perceived understanding of the topic discussed (from an average of 3.5 before the use of the tool to 4.6 after on a 5.0 scale). We present a summary of the survey results, along with the theoretical underpinnings of the approach and some details of the prototype implementation; we also present our design for the next set of experiments with the CONSIDER tool.