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Which Styles of Teaching and Learning Are Effective for Students? – Students' Perspective

Across the nations, institutes of higher education face the problem of retaining and graduating students, predominantly in STEM fields. Computer Science in particular can be isolating for students, and it is argued that CS courses fail because they are boring and hard-to-understand. To address these issues, a number of teaching methods have been proposed and tested such as active learning, hybrid learning, and social learning. However, these approaches do not always consider students with varying cognitive skills. Applying one type of teaching method might not be appropriate for all. To address this issue, educators are trying to discover promising teaching techniques that could be beneficial for cognitively diverse students, with an aim to improve student-learning outcomes and to increase retention rates. In this study, a blended teaching method is introduced where various teaching methods are combined and tested to an undergraduate computer science course. The approaches considered are a) face-to-face lecture with slides, animation, videos and white board demonstrations, b) active learning with online quizzes, c) classroom activity mainly solving algorithmic problems, and d) a semester-long coding project. The results show that the mixture of various learning styles are effective, especially in-class activities along with face-to-face instructions. The subjective evaluation reveals that 26% students learned as expected, 31% students learned more than expected and 40% students mentioned they had learned a lot.