2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Analogies in an Upper Division Operating Systems Course

Presented at Computers in Education Division (COED) Track 3.A

Analogies have a long, and sometimes controversial, history of use in teaching. The question of whether instructor-provided analogies or student-generated ones are more effective for learning in computer science has not been answered. In this study, we examined three different analogy treatments: no analogy, an analogy provided by the instructor, and analogies generated by students during an in-class exercise. We applied these treatments over two offerings of the Operating Systems (OS) course at our institution. We found no statistically significant results across these three treatments. Sometimes students who received no analogy performed better and at other times students who received either the student-generated analogies treatment or the instructor-provided analogies treatment performed better. We also compared the use of either analogy treatment to the use of no analogy, again finding no statistically significant differences. We conclude that instructors can select the teaching method most applicable to their lesson. If an active learning component is needed, then selecting the student-generated analogies option was found, anecdotally, to generate high student engagement. If time is short, the analogy can be skipped altogether.

Authors

Dr. Maria R. Ebling United States Military Academy [biography]

Maria R. Ebling is an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She earned both a Ph.D. and M.S. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College. Her research interest includes pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and Computer Science education. Prior to joining the faculty of West Point, Dr. Ebling spent three years as the Chief Technology Officer at Medaptive Health and nearly 20 years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Ebling is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Dr. Ryan Edward Dougherty United States Military Academy [biography]

Dr. Ryan Dougherty is an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He earned his Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Arizona State University. His research interests include theoretical Computer Science, evolutionary computing, combinatorial algorithms and Computer Science education. Dr. Dougherty spent a year as a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University. He has also been on several program committees in Computer Science education.
Dr. Nicholas Clark University of St. Thomas [biography]

Nicholas Clark is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota in the Department of Mathematics. He earned a Ph.D. in Statistics from Iowa State University and a B.S. in Mathematics from the United States Military Academy. His research interests include spatio-temporal statistical modeling and statistical pedagogy. He is also an associate editor for the Spatial Statistics Journal as well as Military Operations Research Journal.

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