1. Improved retention of students: Due to the challenging nature of Programming and other practical modules on the BSc Computer Science, there has been an increasing difficulty in retaining students beyond the second year of the programme.
2. Improved skills for subsequent years: Students with excellent practical programming skills after second year find themselves in a much stronger position to tackle the challenges of the final two years of the programme.
3. Improved employment prospects: Employers recruit students after the completion of second year for a six month industrial placement module in third year. The primary influence on employers' decisions on who to select is the performance in the practical programming modules. The complexity and success of an individual student's Industrial Placement experience has a direct influence on their employment prospects post-graduation.
4. Improved communication and interpersonal skills: Students taking part in the project will be required to interact with lecturers, teachers, peers and pupils. This will force them to consciously or otherwise develop the necessary skills and confidence to interact with a wide range of individuals.
5. Improved Staff-Student Contact: Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the one of most important factors in student motivation and involvement [2]. In this project staff and students will be working together to prepare class material, thereby giving the student a sense of being a member of a team working towards a common objective.

In addition we envisage a number of supplementary benefits to arise from the project. While these benefits are much wider reaching and require much greater attention than is possible in a project of this size, we see our project as a contributor to these social and educational goals.

This section describes the background for the project, including all participants and relevant preceding projects. The first sub-section describes two projects that have been recently undertaken in the school under the management of this proposal's principal applicant. The second sub-section describes the Community Links office at the DIT, as their involvement was key to the success of both previous projects and is crucial for the project for which funding is being sought. The third sub-section provides a quick discussion of one of the secondary schools which will be involved in the project, focussing in particular on the transition year programme in the school, as it is from this programme (and similar ones in other schools) that the pupils for this project will be selected. Lastly, in the fourth sub-section we provide a quick overview of the area of active learning. Further research on this area will be conducted as part of the project.

3.1 Existing and Previous Projects

The School of Computing has conducted a number of unfunded learning and teaching projects over the past five years in liaison with the Community Links office. Two projects took place for the benefit of, and with the involvement of, students from the Web Development module in second year of the BSc Computer Science.

The first such project, which ran for three years, required various sets of students to develop websites for schools in Dublin's Inner City. Termed a service learning project, because of its relationship to that area of educational research, it resulted in the successful development of websites for 24 separate schools. Overall, over 100 DIT students were involved. Details of the project have been published in the proceedings of the Second China-Europe Symposium on Software Industry-Oriented Education and have been submitted to Ireland's Fourth Annual Conference on Teaching & Learning. In summary, the key observed benefits to the DIT students from the project are as follows:

1. They were able to witness a real software development project in operation from beginning to end, incorporating all stages of the standard Systems Development Lifecycle, from requirements analysis to deployment. Such experience is rarely, if ever, available to undergraduate students.
2. They were forced to develop the key transferable skills such as teamwork, communication, presentation and ethics. This was particularly important because they were required to interact with real software users and real clients, rather than the more typical simulated environments.
3. They were properly prepared for their Industrial Placement in third year, since they had already interacted with groups and individuals outside the campus with whom they were required to have a professional relationship.
4. The novelty of the project encouraged participation and interest in the module, positively affecting student performance.

The second project is currently ongoing, and is more closely related to the project for which funding is being sought. It involves a six-week set of tutorials on Web Design for transition year pupils in Brunswick St CBS. The aim of the project is to provide the 13 participating pupils from Brunswick St CBS with the skills required to develop, manage and maintain their school's website. 10 volunteer students from second year of the BSc Computer Science are participating in the project with their role incorporating:

1. The development of lesson plans for each of the six weeks.
2. The research and provision of materials to help the pupil's skill development.
3. The supervision of pupils over the six weeks.

Tutorials take place for 90 minutes on Wednesday evenings. The 10 volunteer DIT students, selected on a first come, first served basis, participate in the project as an alternative to a small component of the assessment of the Web Development module. Their mark for the assessment will be based on the management of the project, as well as the quality of the final product developed. Requiring students to develop and provide instruction is seen as something that is of great benefit to their web development skills, and it is expected that this will be reflected in their performance in this element of their coursework as well as their final summative assessment.

3.2 Community Links Office

The Community Links Office manages a number of projects in communities which experience educational disadvantage in Dublin city. It is funded through partnership with educational, voluntary, statutory and community bodies as well as the corporate sector. One important project is DISC (Dublin Inner City Schools Computerisation Project).

The DISC Project was established in 1998 with the aim of achieving equality of access, opportunity and training to Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) across inner-city disadvantaged schools.

In order to achieve this aim a co-ordinated and structured programme for the upgrade of inner-city disadvantaged primary and post-primary schools was put in place. Relevant teacher training programmes were developed and implemented and the DISC ICT Projects Initiative was established.

The project is currently working with 42 inner city schools (9 post-primary, 33 primary) with approximately 7,000 pupils and 700 teachers in total.

It was under the DISC umbrella that the two projects described above were run. Collaboration with DISC is also important for the project for which we are seeking funding.

3.3 Brunswick St. Christian Brothers School

Brunswick St CBS is one of 42 schools designated by the Department of Education as serving disadvantaged areas in Dublin's Inner-City. Located on North Brunswick St on the northside of Dublin, it has served the local area since 1869. It currently has a student population numbering 201 pupils, across five years (first year, second year, third year, transition year and sixth year [there are currently no fifth year students, as all third year students passed into the transition year, which became available for the first time this year]).

38 pupils from the school are currently participating in transition year. Although optional, it is projected that there will be between 25 and 30 pupils in transition year in the academic year beginning in September 2006. Pupils in the current transition year class are undertaking a wide range of projects, including:

• Work Experience: Two weeks of traditional work experience, coupled with two weeks of work experience in a special community project, such as the soup kitchens in the local areas.
• ECDL: The pupils are taking all seven stages of the European Computer Driving Licence examinations, leading to the award of the ECDL certificate.
• President's Award: Pupils spend 26 hours acquiring a skill, 15 hours engaged in physical activity, 12 hours contributing to the community and a weekend on an adventure trip. Upon completion the pupils are eligible for the President's award, an internationally recognised award for young people between 15 and 25 years old.
• Television Production: The pupils produced a 20 minute documentary.
• Fire Safety: The pupils completed a short course fire safety and first aid.
• Build a Bank: The students opened and managed a bank in the school, in cooperation with Allied Irish Bank.

In addition to this, 13 pupils from the school have just participated in the Web Design project in the School of Computing, as described in section 2.2.

Historically there has been very little progression by the school's graduates to further education. Despite some involvement in apprenticeship and post-Leaving Certificate courses, there has been less than 5% progression to Level-7 (ordinary degree) or Level-8 (honours degree) programmes.

3.4 Active Learning

Given the increase in participation in third level education in recent years and the consequent diversity in students' backgrounds, learning styles and ranges of ability, there has been a growing focus on active forms of learning supported by performance based assessment as opposed to the passive forms of instruction and assessment traditionally employed by education providers.

Analysis of the published literature in the area [2] suggests that students must do more than just listen passively to a lecture. Lectures must actively engage the student with the subject material by using instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing.

The guiding principle behind active learning [3, 4] is that the student is forced to assume greater responsibility in organising the material that must be learned, resulting in diverse groups of students employing diverse approaches to learning while sharing a common learning environment. The Learning Pyramid (described in [5], shown in Figure 3) from the USA's National Training Laboratory [6] graphically demonstrates the average retention rates by students involved in passive and active learning. According to the research leading to the development of the pyramid, the most effective tool for facilitating student knowledge retention is getting students to actively teach others.

Other popular active learning strategies include the pause procedure [7] whereby lectures are paused temporarily to allow students exchange notes and actively discuss the content; various kinds of techniques that employ e-Learning and collaborative tools [8, 9] and much work on co-operation and group based activities [10].

Much work in the United States has examined how universities and high schools can complement each other is supporting student learning [11]. There is also a wide body of research examining instruction on programming courses [12, 13, 14], although little or no attention has been directed towards instructional models for revision or review of material.

Figure 3: Learning Pyramid, reflecting knowledge retention following activities.

4. Project Description

This section provides a detailed discussion of the project as we intend to carry it out.

4.1 Overview

The three dimensions of the R-CUBE at the core of our project are:

• Reviewing
• Reinforcing
• Rewarding

as shown in Figure 1 above.

The guiding principle behind the cube is that by forcing students to review the material in an environment where they must actively engage with it in order to provide instruction, then the students are reinforcing their existing knowledge by learning it in a different way and considering problems that they may not have previously been required to consider. Primarily however, the reinforcement occurs while students are actively explaining a concept, solution or approach to a novice. The third dimension reflects that value and benefits to the student. Reward in this case does not refer to assessment grades or marks as these are not awarded for the work completed. The reward is in the individual student's development of their technical and interpersonal skills as well as a substantial improvement in their prospects for their continuing education.

The R-CUBE is not a replacement from the standard instructional models employed, derived typically from Biggs' constructive alignment. It should complement existing models by facilitating a review of earlier material at all stages of a programme, in parallel with other modules. This is demonstrated graphically in Figure 4 below.
 

Figure 4: Progression through a programme, with parallel delivery and review.

4.2 Format

Although our instructional model is intended to be general enough to suit multiple stages and domains, our initial implementation and evaluation will examine its effectiveness when applied to computer programmers at stage 2 of the four year BSc Computer Science. Further investigation will be required for its evaluation at later stages.

The project will involve 12 weeks of instruction to between 15 and 20 transition year pupils. The subject to be presented will be Introduction to Computer Programming. A full syllabus and description of the content, developed in accordance with the DIT Guide to Writing Learning Outcomes is available here.

Selection of Pupils

The transition year pupils will be selected by the project co-ordinators, in liaison with the teachers in a selection of secondary schools. While we already have close ties with Brunswick St CBS, we intend to also approach three other schools, two of which will be all-female schools. It is expected that we will recruit approximately 4 pupils from each of the four schools to participate in the project.

In order to select the pupils, they will be required to complete a simple application form, and will then be selected for interview. The interview will be carried out in the school and will involve staff from both DIT and the school involved. The key criteria for selection of pupils are:

• Their commitment to their education.
• Their competence in Mathematics and English, both of which are useful indicators of a competence in programming.
• Their interest in problem solving and puzzles such as crosswords, sudoku, brain teasers.

A sample application form is given here. It is intended that selection will take place during the summer months, after the pupils have completed their Junior Certificate, or at the beginning of September.

Selection of Students

While the content to be delivered is predefined, all instructional materials including PowerPoint slides, handouts and tasks will be developed by both the instructors from DIT and the DIT students.

The novelty of this project is that we intend to select the students who we feel are most in need of additional support for the development of their practical programming skills. In other similar projects, the strongest students would usually be selected. The primary objective of this project is, however, to present new learning opportunities to the students who most require it. For this reason, we intend to select students who satisfy the following criteria:

• Successfully passed first year.
• Are willing to commit to the 12 weeks of the project.
• Achieved low marks in their Programming module in first year, resulting in their passing by compensation, or passing by achieving a mark close to the pass mark.

We expect to be able to recruit between 5 and 10 students. Every effort will be made on our part to encourage students to participate. While a number of our students could be considered weak, there is much evidence of commitment to their education. This, we feel, will result in sufficient interest in the project.

Staff Involvement

In order for the project to be a success, we will require three staff members to be present at each of the tutorials. It is imperative that staff members are available in order to supervise both the students and the pupils and to help explain concepts or approaches where necessary. The Department of Education policy towards disadvantaged schools, including those in Dublin's Inner-City has resulted in a very positive staff-pupil ratio. We intend to carry this policy over to our project and consider this central to the success of the project.

Tutorial Format

Each of the 12 tutorials will run for 2 hours, from either 15:00 to 17:00 or 17:00 to 19:00 every Wednesday for 12 weeks.

Prior to the tutorial, the DIT students will have met with a staff member to discuss:

• The Learning Outcomes that will be addressed in the tutorial.
• The content to be presented in the tutorial.
• The development of PowerPoint slides and handouts. These will be put together by staff and students working together.
• The tasks to be completed by the pupils during the tutorial.

During the tutorial which will take place in one of the School of Computing's computer laboratories. A DIT staff member will present the material in the traditional format from the top of the class. Each of the DIT students will sit between a number of the pupils and help them to carry out the tasks that will form part of the tutorial. This is the same format as is currently successfully employed for the Web Design tutorials with Brunswick St. school. In addition, the three DIT staff members will monitor each of the students and pupils as they are carrying out the tasks, and will be on hand to answer any questions.

5. Timeline

A full timeline is given here:

 The proposed dates for the 12 tutorials are as follows:

6. Evaluation

1. J. Biggs (1999), Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Open University Press

2. A. Chickering, Z. Gamson (1987), Seven Principles for Good Practice, AAHE Bulletin 39: 3-7.

3. McConnell, J. (2001), Analysis of Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach, Jones and Bartlett

4. Prince, M. (2004), Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research, Journal of Engineering Education, 93:3, 223-231

5. Wood, E. J. (2004), Problem-Based Learning: Exploiting Knowledge of how People Learn to Promote Effective Learning, Bioscience Education Journal (3-5)

6. National Training Laboratory

7. Ruhl, K. L., Hughes, C. A., & Schloss, P. J. (1987), Using the pause procedure to enhance lecture recall, Teacher Education and Special Education, 10, 14-18.

8. Jayawardana, C., Hewagamage, C. P., Hirakawa, M. (2001), Personalization Tools for Active Learning in Digital Libraries, The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship, v.8(1)

9. Richards, C. (2005), The Design of Effective ICT-Supported Learning Activities: Exemplary Models, Changing Requirements and New Possibilities, Language Learning & Technology, 9(1)

10. Oakley, B., Felder, R.M., Brent, R., and Elhajj, I. (2004), Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams, Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2(1), 9-34

11. College in the Schools at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

12. A. Lui, R. Kwan, M. Poon, Y. Cheung, Saving weak programming students: applying constructivism in a first programming course, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Volume 36 Issue 2, June 2004

13. R. Lister, J. Leaney (2003), First year programming: let all the flowers bloom, In proceedings of the fifth Australasian conference on Computing education

14. M. McCracken, et. al (2001), A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students, WG report from ITiCSE on Innovation and Technology in CS Education