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Enhancing Active Learning in Web Development Classes Using Pairwise Pre-and-Post Lecture Quizzes

Active learning has been considered effective in enhancing students’ engagement and improving learning achievement. Nevertheless, the implementation of active learning in web development education is limited especially in teacher-centered lectures and tutorials. In this paper, we propose an approach to encourage students’ active participation into the learning process in web development lectures. This approach involves injecting a pair of quizzes at the beginning and the end of each lecture. The pre-lecture quiz drives students to reflect on their prior knowledge and assumptions of the topics associated to the learning content, as well as serving as a cognitive hook that triggers interest and motivation in learning. The post-lecture quiz raises students’ awareness of the learning process and enhances metacognitive activities. Instead of using quizzes as an assessment tool, the proposed approach leverages pairwise quizzes in each lecture to promote metacognitive activities in students’ mind and raise their consciousness of the learning process. In the meantime, this approach allows teachers to track the changes in students’ mental model of the topics and to evaluate teaching outcomes. We share our experience on implementing this approach in the tutorial phase of a web development course. A comparison between students’ responses to the pre-lecture and post-lecture quizzes demonstrated how students’ mental model on the key learning topics evolved in each lecture. This experience report provides rich implications to educators of web development or software engineering in general.