A Quantitative Assessment of Visual Cognition Versus Constructivism in Computer Science

Alongside the many challenges of Covid-19, the pandemic also disrupted the normal structure of education for students. As classes were being transferred to online formats, computer science students started learning more through constructivism principles rather than the traditionally taught, in-person lectures. This quantitative assessment hopes to determine whether constructivist principles or traditional/visual cognition principles are better for teaching computer science topics. Determinations will be made through a social behavioral experiment teaching pointers to participants. Participants were split into three groups: a control group, a constructivist group, and a visual cognition group. Each group took part in an assessment testing their knowledge retention about pointers after having a lecture based around each teaching method. The assessment evaluated retries per assessment, time per correct answer, time per question, and the average time taken in total. The results of the experiment led to a conclusion that, according to the resulting data, constructivism teaching principles benefited participant scores, and visual cognition teaching principles worsened participant scores. However, a definitive answer of which teaching method is better for computer science could not be made due to insufficient sample size. When reflecting on the first iteration of this experiment, it is clear that future iterations of this experiment would benefit from a higher sample size, an easier assignment for the constructivist group, a feedback survey, and a longer period to experiment.