Providing students with agency to self-scaffold in a computational science and engineering course

Abstract

This study implements a design-based research approach to design and evaluate different scaffolding strategies for supporting student learning as well as promoting student agency within a computational science course. The course introduces computational methods and tools in the context of disciplinary problems for materials science and engineering students. Initial course offerings suggested that students were overwhelmed by the interdisciplinary nature of the course. Therefore, the research team evaluated different scaffolding strategies for supporting students’ learning, and how those may have provided students with agency to self-scaffold when needed. Three rounds of data collection included 17 students who participated in individual semi-structured interviews to explore how they used (or not) different scaffolds. Five of the participants were recruited for the first iteration; six of them were recruited in the second iteration, and six more in the third one. The iterative process allowed us to adapt the scaffolding procedures for the third iteration from the data collected in iterations 1 and 2. The purpose of this study is to understand how students used different scaffolds, and what implementation strategies were effective according to student uses of these scaffolds in the context of computational science. The results suggest that students developed agency to self-scaffold when needed, as they benefited from multiple scaffolds at different steps of the problem-solving process. Moreover, providing worked examples without engaging students in their active exploration can be ineffective, but this engagement can be achieved using written explanations. Additional support may be needed at an early stage of skill development, so students have an idea of how to validate their model.

Appendix A: Additional quotes

Scaffolding and their uses in iteration 1

Video Lectures

Phoenix_H: having the slides available is huge because then you can go through it at your own pace, and I think that’s how come the quizzes obviously I’ve done well on those. So without the slides and just the lecture I think it would be a lot harder for me to succeed in those.

Instructor and TA

Charlie_H: “<the professor > doesn’t work with MatLab…, which is okay. He’s working with another software. He maybe doesn’t have time, but he’s teaching the class like he should, but he didn’t. … Overall I figured that suggestions from [the course instructor] or the class introduction made the project harder because I had to find [the solution]

Peer-Scaffolding

Jessie_H: And I just want to make sure because I know some of my classmates, they’ll type in the function. We’ll do the same outputs and then we’ll get different answers and it worries us and then we’ll get someone else that will test it and they’ll either agree with me or agree with them.

Charlie_H :“before starting to talk. I needed one hour to just read this, write my code plan out, my inputs and outputs and functions that I’m going to use. Understand those, before getting to coding. During that part, I’m really trying to understand so there’s no point in having a partner at that point.”

Code snippets

Phoenix_H: I mean initially I was confused and I was kind of overwhelmed, but once I sat down and read it I had to pick a place to start, so obviously I started with stim tissue. I like the way that they’re laid out. That really helps you understand it.

Test Cases

Jessie_H:[the TA] is a big proponent of having us do test cases like either doing it in the command window or making an M file of just not a function, just something you can run, testing a certain method. So we did that and we it didn’t take too long to get these two functions down where like then one thing that was an element of the debugging was everyone do the same exact inputs, see if you get the same thing, and if you didn’t, you would help it’s actually very helpful.

Scaffolding and their uses in iteration 2

Video Lectures

Emerson_H: “I did actually buy the electronic textbook that was a recommended resource. I ended up not reading as much of it, I think, halfway through the semester, because basically whatever was covered in the textbook was covered in the lectures albeit in a somewhat different order”

Worked Examples

Justice_H: “Well, in order to make the comments, at least I hope that they’re right, but in order to do that you really need to go through line by line what each line’s doing. And I mean, the solutions that they have are these versions of– usually they worked out example exercises or like really elegant and, you know, it’s sort of an example of how to do these things very well and simply.”

Logan_L: “It definitely helps. One of them was debugging and I think that for our final project we need to use GUIs which is the most recent extra credit that I haven’t done yet, but I’m assuming that will help me. For the final project. Yeah, so they definitely help”

Alexis_L: I used most of them. Most of them I’ve seen and I did have to see the YouTube videos for knowing what was going on because– more what was going on because they give like an example of more like what the code was, but I kind of looked at the YouTube video to see what was going on in each line of code.

Elliot_L: I felt that those were helpful because then you get to– most of them are exercises that we didn’t get to in class, so it helped to have someone walk through all of them.

Peer-Scaffolding

Armani_H: When we don’t understand something about the actual application of the assignment, we go to them, mainly the professor, sometimes the TA. If you have a problem with the code… I can’t figure it out, right? I’ll look to my peers. I’ll say like can you help me with this, whatever. And if they can’t figure out, or everyone has the same problem, I go to the TA

Emerson_H: I think my group, when we discuss things, we usually can’t come to a conclusion when we’re talking about the project proposal or interpreting the results, because none of us feel confident in our answers to be able to dictate, okay, this is what it must mean

Code snippets

Emerson_H: “And so the only three new parameters here were T, S time and P time. And I think for this, this was the one function where the way it was described to us was kind of confusing, ‘cause at first I didn’t realize that the simulation lasted T time steps. I thought that T was the actual time at which it was running.”

Logan_L: “So we just went function by function.”

Justice_H: “So the first day… we had some time to work on it. And so I did stim tissue first because that’s what the first function was, and it seemed pretty easy”

Test Cases

Justice_H: “there was a certain input that he[the TA] ran that generated this and he showed a couple of the plots of it…. That was just to show, so an example of– and since stim tissue it’s necessarily random, but it was just to show us an example of how things should look because I think without seeing it visually it might be difficult to determine whether or not your plots are even close to being accurate”

Logan_L: “We were given tests, like to test our code. We were given specific inputs and then they showed us what it should look like… They gave us pictures.”

Scaffolding and their Uses in Iteration 3

Worked Examples

Harper_L: “Yeah, I do them all. Probably mostly just for extra credit. But it is helpful, because you get to see how other functions are working. Because a lot of those I don’t know if I’d just be able to write myself. So when we have the example given to us and you comment it, you learn how it’s working and then maybe I would be able to write it myself after seeing it.”

Ash_H: “I found them useful at the beginning of class– ‘cause … I had programmed a bit before this…. So, I had, like, some idea of how to program, but the way of doing things, the way MATLAB would like you to do them and all the MATLAB syntax was very new to me. So, getting used to that was– they were useful for getting used to that for me, but they’re weren’t as– like, the concepts that were being learned were not that new. So, I didn’t need them after I sort of learned the MATLAB way of handling data.”

Instructor and TA

Oakley_L: my first two projects were really horrible, I had, like, this really big problem feeling like I could talk to the people in my group. I guess like just students in general in my class. And I kind of felt like the outsider, and I felt really self-conscious and unconfident about talking to any of the students, because I felt like I wasn’t contributing… And so when I’m talking to someone I’m kind of hoping that maybe they can maybe kind of explain it to me a little bit better. But it felt like to me when other students were talking they were going, “Oh, what do you know? What do you know? Now let’s compare.” I’m like, “Oh.” I felt bad. I kind of, I felt really bad going, “I really don’t get it.”

… Especially like if I’m talking to a TA and they’re like, ‘Oh, just think about this,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And then I get stuck like 20 s later…. I was feeling so horrible about programming, because as is known, you can program the same thing multiple ways or a different way to do things. And so whenever I was looking at the code, you know, even when people, like, talking about the TA’s trying to help me, trying to like guide me through it, they’re like, ‘Well, we’re not trying to tell you which way to go.’ But like in my mind, I’m like, ‘Hey, I would love to be like a basic formula and that’s what I go with’.

[the instructor is] extremely accessible. I’m like even though it’s like e-mail. I mean, he responds crazy fast. And if you do ask him questions he’s like as thorough as he possibly can. And like if you talk to him you just feel like you just like are enlightened about the universe.

Dakota_L: So it kind of makes it hard for the people who don’t know what they’re doing, especially when those people need help from TAs and stuff like that, because, well, they’re starting on the project, and they’re way more behind than the people who know what they’re doing, so then they’re getting help debugging, but we’re also waiting for help. We’re fighting for help, kind of like the people who are over here are in a different place than the people who are further behind on the project.

Remy_H: “for the most part, I understood how to implement anything…I guess there wasn’t really an issue that I came to that I didn’t know how to solve”

Peer-scaffolding

Harper_L: I think it’s definitely helpful. We work in groups a good amount even during class hours when we have the opportunity to work on the projects we mostly work in groups. And it’s helpful, because like I said, because it’s good to have someone else’s eyes look at it, because sometimes you’re just missing something and it’s right in front of you, but you can’t see, because you’ve been looking at it for so long. So that’s definitely helpful and also talking through to get started, I think. When we do the planning in class, it’s also really helpful to have groups, because everyone can just brainstorm together and when everyone’s ideas comes together it helps a lot.

Landry_H: “And also compared my results to of my classmates. Because… Yeah, it’s very helpful. It’s like, yeah. I found out the bug here after I compared my results to other people whose…”

Remy_H: “we sort of sat together for the first class period that they gave us to sort of discuss the general structure of it and we even sort of outlined the plan a very similar way because we were talking together at the time… this one was also a little bit more open-ended as well saying what causes the problems and we don’t really know what exactly that is, but I looked to see if people were getting similar results or what they thought was sort of the problem as the questions asks, just to make sure were in sort of the same thing.”

Code Snippets

Dakota_L: “I used the main assignment PDF just to give me my outlines of functions.”

Harper_L: “they were very helpful to get you– I think me personally, it’s hard to get started if you don’t know the structure of each one and the given inputs and outputs. It’s easier to differentiate the flow and what you’re going to need to do when you have the structure and also the description of each function.”

Remy_H: “I mean for most of them, the program was broken up in a similar way that I would have done it, so I had no problem sort of literally using these … but they definitely structured the program in a way that I think did make it easier for maybe those who didn’t quite– who would be kind of lost without it, I think they were helpful”

Ash_H: “I think the when you’re not given a structure it’s more difficult, because you can sort of use this as like a peek ahead to see how it should work in the end. So I think it makes a lot of sense that he gives them, he gives us structures towards the beginning of the semester and then doesn’t towards the end of the semester, makes sense.”

Test Cases

Oakley_L “[the instructor] gave us test cases. Do these test cases match his test cases? Yes, they do. When I put my program with these values. And so I’m supposed to come in with those same values, and they do the same thing. Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m on the right path here. But so far it’s understanding what each detail. I’m like, “Mm.” And so what I finally broke it down to when it’s saying, when it’s talking about it’s going to expand over the area, I was thinking was, I guess, was talking about this pulse that the heart is making. So it made sense in my mind. I’m like, “It’s the heart. It pulses. That’s what these expanding rings are.” And that’s what I left it as.”

Harper_L: “So then for testing, first I did the given test cases and my code and those are shown here.… And these were the outputs that were given as test cases as well, so I knew that was working correctly. This was also a given test case, so it’s just stem tissue and that’s what happened when U was inputted to stem tissue…. So I don’t really think I used outside sources besides the description here and just fooling around with the test cases and picking random values a little bit and seeing what would happen when they were picked.”

Ash_H: “So, this was just a test whether the initiation works….The second test case was stepping the same tissue one time– … it’s just stepping this by one time and there’s a certain amount of change in potential and of diffusion that you should see.”

Remy_H: “So these were the given test cases, initialize tissue, this is just not graphical at all, just to sort of make sure– this is to help you sort of go with the idea of testing each sub function along the way. Then the next test case was to show that the way you implemented the updating conditions were working correctly. And that’s similar with test case three”