CS + X

On Tuesday, we brought in Kathleen on a Zoom call to explain the concepts behind the project. Similar to the first session, she introduced the study of linguistics with relevant examples for the students. This session, we noticed that the students were not as engaged during the hybrid lecture portion of the lesson, so when we finished this activity we decided to switch gears to complete the “English Grammar Quiz” Kahoot.

Before the Kahoot, I wanted to have the students review the grammar concepts that they would see not only in the project but the Kahoot as well. This technique is similar to pre-teaching and review, and it helps students build upon their previous knowledge. I decided to create a word cloud with the students about the main ideas of the quiz: intransitive verbs, adjectives, proper and regular nouns, and determiners. After providing a definition and example for one term, I asked each student to define the term in their own words and add an example to the list. After iterating through each term, we felt confident that the students would be able to succeed on the quiz.

I revised this quiz after the first session to be more within the scope and sequence of the project; in other words, I removed superfluous information to ensure students were honing in on the details we were testing for. In addition, after each question, there was repeat of the same question but with the labeled English term for immediate feedback and the opportunity to try again.

For example if the first question was: Verbs are action words or states of being. In this sentence, what is the verb: Jadzia was incredibly angry at her.

• Jadzia
• was
• incredibly
• her

The following question would be: Verbs are action words or states of being. In this sentence, what is the verb: Jadzia was incredibly angry at her.

• Jadzia- this is a proper noun because it is someone’s name
• was- this is a verb because it describes Jadzia’s state of being
• incredibly- this is an adverb because it modifies angry
• her- this is a pronoun and refers to another person

The most important part of this activity for me was that the students were able to learn and grow with that immediate feedback; from the students perspective, they were able answer each reflection question quickly and earn “extra points” from the Kahoot game, so it made the atmosphere exciting with friendly competition.

Lastly, we dove into the project’s code and went code block by code block describing the functions of SENT and how a randomly generated noun phrase was added to the sentence. The students were able to follow along and asked questions throughout to affirm their understandings. I could tell that the parsing tree logic was difficult for the students, so I feel that we may need to revisit this the next time we meet.

Study Skills and Belonging

The team reconvened twice this week to check in after the Fourth of July holiday to dive into the differences in time spent with resources between the latent class analysis categorized classes. Class 1 was identified as the top performers with the highest grades as well as a high score in growth mindset and value; Class 2 performed well in the class with quite low growth mindset; Class 3 was identified with the lowest grades as well as low growth mindset, belonging, and value; Class 4 was similar to Class 2 with slightly less value.

We observed visualizations of the time spent on resources from each class, and we saw some differences but not many were statistically significant, and therefore are not reliable indicators of differences. General trends we found was that Class 1 heavily used the textbook and practice examlets; Class 2 and Class 4 spent a lot of time with practice examlets; Class 3 used practice examlets and outside resources. It was interesting that Class 3 had the lowest overall midterm and final grades and was the only class that invested a lot of time in external resources. External resources were identified as anything outside of the course provided materials of textbook, tutorial and practice problems, Piazza a class website, practice examlets, lecture videos, and lecture notes. Common external resources that are identified in the interviews are chatGPT, Google, and Youtube.

Based on these results from the data, we decided our next steps would be a linear regression to try to quantify the impact of the resources utilized and final grades. A linear regression calculates the dependent variable, in this grade the final grade, from the independent variables, the resources, and attends to create a line of best fit. From this line, we can make predictions of future students’ earned final grades based on the utilization of resources in their study. The end goal would be to encourage students to adopt a study schedule based on these proven successful recommendations. I am hopeful we may find that external resources could be a negative contributor to final grades, so we can suggest that students spend their time reviewing the course sanctioned materials.

General Reflections

Since pivoting from the teaching profession to computer science, and then subsequently finding myself in an educator role in computer science, I am learning a lot about how students learn mathematical concepts such as parsing trees and programming. When I used to teach music, I saw the students regularly and was able to get to know their interests, so I could link concepts they were struggling with to concepts they knew and liked. With the Upward Bound sessions, I am relying on experiences that I hope are universal; such as, wondering if it will rain outside and whether to take an umbrella or not and wondering about TikTok’s algorithms to show you content that may interest you. For future teaching experiences, I would like to remember the success the students had once I ensured each activity was within the scope and sequence of the curriculum.

It was a bit of a letdown to not see many statistically significant differences between the resources used between the groups. When working with human behavior and patterns, I know it is common not to see sharp differences because there are so many influences to behavior. Still, I am learning of other ways to cross section and examine data that go beyond the introductory steps of descriptive analytics. The linear regression is another way of examining data trends, so I hope we will be able to discover another direction to insights.