Measuring the impact of a learner centric pedagogical technique for a core competency of a course in data base management systems

Abstract

Computer Science Education faces two major problems - one being the continuous evolvement of the discipline itself, and, secondly, the issue of appropriate employment of graduating students. Instructors and educators need to periodically reinvent and restructure their curriculum to keep their learners abreast. An effective approach is to structure the curriculum by defining the requisite competencies as the instructional goals and subsequently defining the conceptual requirements to achieve these goals. When the outcomes of learning are clearly specified, activities must be designed and assessments logically done to confirm to what degree the required learning has been achieved. Certain instructional pedagogies may help students to acquire the mental processes for learning more efficiently, and to ably analogize and annotate the acquired skill. Thoughtful and detailed planning, understanding of the stakeholders and their needs, and an appropriate testing and feedback mechanism can maximize the benefits and minimize the negatives of a learning environment. This paper describes a study performed on one such learner centric pedagogical approach. The results of this analysis are expected to throw light about the impact of a competency based activity in the presence of a homogenous group formation. The paper describes the implementation and examines the learning effectiveness of a collaborative, peer-reviewed, learner-centric activity based instructional design approach for a core competency in a course on Data Base Management Systems at the Masters Level program in Computer Science.