À la Carte Recitation: Allowing Students to Choose their CS Laboratory ExperienceIn-PersonK12
Many colleges and universities offer recitation sections for their large CS courses to help give students individual practice, more in-depth exploration of the lecture material, and one on one assistance with programming concepts. Often this recitation is not required and students will only attend if they feel that their time was put to good use. This lightning talk will introduce an idea that we could help students succeed better by offering an array of choices of recitation sections and allowing the students to choose which to attend to fit their individual needs. The sections could consist of easy, medium and extremely difficult practice problems, review material from earlier in the semester, working ahead for those students who want to go into advanced material, or even a recitation for industry professionals to come in and talk about how the material is applied in their professions. Giving students freedom to choose their recitation section based on content rather than just arbitrarily assigning one earned positive feedback from both students and TAs when I attempted this remotely during the pandemic. This lightning talk is to solicit feedback and possibly collaboration for a larger study on this type of à la carte recitation.