Active learning and process assessment

Abstract

This paper reports on a junior-lcvcl software engineering course at the University of Alabama where students learn Ada for the first time. The course is organized around the concept of broadening the scope of students' software development experience from very small programs to larger, nontrivial applications. This course is widely perccivcd as difficult by students, and is generally thought of as a "weed-out" course for computer science majors. To increase student rct.ention, we are currently attempting two major experiments in the course: the pervasive use of active and cooperative learning techniques and the assessment of the student programming process. This paper reports on preliminary results from both of these experiments.