The effect of embedded questions in programming education videos

One of the primary objective in a computer science related course is for students to be able to write programs implementing the concepts covered in that course. In educational psychology, however, learning gains are more commonly measured using recall or problem solving questions. While these types of questions are relevant to computer science exams, they do not necessarily reflect a student’s ability to apply concepts by writing an original program to solve a novel problem.

This thesis investigates the effectiveness of including questions within instructional multimedia content to improve student performance on a related programming assignment. Similar techniques have proven effective in educational psychology research using other measures. The objective of this thesis is to apply educational techniques used in other domains to an experiment with real world measures of students in a computer science course. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the techniques used were promising in improving student performance on a programming assignment.