2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Textbooks are an anachronistic element of education in the 21st century which previous research shows students do not read despite reading assignments. For over a decade, computing education has evolved from textbooks to ebooks to interactive learning experiences with animations, built-in IDEs, and autograders. More recent work has shown that many of these innovations such as paired programming, code visualizers, and Parsons problems have positive educational outcomes such as student engagement, retention, and increased learning gains – particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. Unfortunately, due to the origins of these learning experiences being textbooks they often still look like text-heavy ebooks instead of evidence-based, interactive learning experiences.

This paper uses data from a computing education platform used in dozens of US universities and thousands of students to explore the relationship between how much time students spend reading compared to the amount of text in the reading assignment. Specifically, we do multiple regression analyses to understand how independent variables including word count, assessments, and whether students engaged with code, affect dependent variables such as assignment grade and how student’s time was spent.

We find that even without fine-grained details, learning experiences where students are spending more time actively coding as opposed to reading result in higher performance. These at scale results solidify that it is time for the field to break out of the overly passive textbook paradigm and embrace learning experiences which center student opportunities to code.