Improving Interactive Instruction: Faculty Engagement Requires Starting Small and Telling All

Abstract

Interactive instruction, such as student-centered learning or active learning, is known to benefit student success as well as diversity in computer science. However, there is a persistent and substantial dissonance between research and practice of computer science education techniques. Current research on computer science education, while extensive, sees limited adoption beyond the original researchers. The developed educational technologies can lack sufficient detail for replication or be too specific and require extensive reworking to be employable by other instructors. Furthermore, instructors face barriers to adopting interactive techniques within their classroom due to student reception, resources, and awareness. We argue that the advancement of computer science education, in terms of propagation and sustainability of student-centered teaching, requires guided approaches for incremental instructional changes as opposed to revolutionary pedagogy. This requires the prioritization of lightweight techniques that can fit within existing lecture formats to enable instructors to overcome barriers hindering the adoption of interactive techniques. Furthermore, such techniques and innovations must be documented in the form of computing education research artifacts, building upon the practices of software artifacts.