Week 3: Literature Review

Last week my goal was to spend 8 hours on research and I am happy to announce I made that goal. It was still difficult filtering the distractions but I was able to spend 2 hours updating my late blogs and 2 hours on my literature review. I started be rereading the proposal. Then I began my literature review starting with 1 of the many research papers on related to our research with block programming.

The paper was, Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach by Barbara Moskal, Deborah Lurie, and Stephen Copper. For the sake of simplicity, I will be referring to this research as the "Alice course". In this paper, the researchers focus on a way to "develop and evaluates a course curriculum designed to improve the retention and performance for 'at risk' introductory computer science (CS) majors" (1). At risk, in this sense, can be defined as students who did not enter the CS program with a strong foundation in math or any foundation in programming. And in order to help these students, the study used 3D animation structure.

The researchers believe that they can improve the retention rate of first year CS students by offering them a curriculum that teaches Object Oriented (OO) concepts and retain them doing these 4 things:

• Motivate them by using 3D graphics

• Help them visualize mistakes and allow them to get instant feedback so that students can see their mistakes and see the change

• In the 3D rendering, a drag-and-drop that prevents syntax errors

• 3D model classes that make concepts of objects concrete

There were 3 groups in the experiment. The treatment group, students at risk and enrolled in the Alice course, the control group 1, at risk students and did not enroll in the Alice course, and control group 2, students who were not at risk and not enrolled in the Alice course. The conclusions were supportive. The retention rate of the treatment group was 88%, higher than the usual 70%. The Alice group had outpaced the other groups retention rates.

During my reading, I made sure to take extensive notes and I even came up with a preliminary template for how I want to take notes for the literature I read. I write them down but soon I will have to make my notes electronic for the sake of having conciseness and for when we begin gathering our findings for our reports and presentations.

Next week I want to get through 2 literature reviews. And I want to try to work for at least 10 hours.