> Executive summary: Students learning to program typically divide into two
> populations: those who can easily learn, and those who can't. Teaching
> techniques and curriculum innovation seem to have no effect. Are there any
> effective ways of testing student aptitude before entering the course?
Richard,
Your observation was made specifically of a postgraduate conversion course.
I suspect that this context might result in particularly exaggerated
effects. In Cambridge we teach a postgraduate diploma conversion
course in Computer Science, where the same thing is often noted. This
seems to be because students join the course with widely differing
motivations. Some students come with a maths or physics degree, in which
they have done a substantial amount of programming, or even with a
couple of years post-graduate experience in computing research, which
they want to supplement with a formal qualification in computer science.
Other students come from non-computing backgrounds, and use the diploma as
an entree into the world of computing.
It's clear that this will result in a bimodal distribution, and we do
our best to structure the course in a way that caters to the varying
requirements of these groups.
Based on my experience of these students, and on your observations, I
have the following points to make:
1. Rather than students who "can learn" and "can't", all we are seeing
is students who "have learnt" and "have yet to learn". If so, this is
simply a matter of educational politics, rather than student aptitude.
2. Is there any reason why these conversion courses don't attract a
middle kind of student? If we assumed that programming knowledge or
aptitude was normally distributed, this bimodal distribution might
simply indicate that we are excluding the middle of the distribution
when promoting or selecting for these courses.
3. Does the same dynamic that I have observed also apply to undergraduates,
or was Rob Rist also referring to students on a postgraduate conversion
course?
Alan
--
Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418
