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Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment

Ali Malik, Juliette Woodrow, Chris Piech

TL;DR

Assessment via Teaching is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams and is shown to be naturally difficult to cheat.

Abstract

We propose and carry-out a novel method of formative assessment called Assessment via Teaching (AVT), in which learners demonstrate their understanding of CS1 topics by tutoring more novice students. AVT has powerful benefits over traditional forms of assessment: it is centered around service to others and is highly rewarding for the learners who teach. Moreover, teaching greatly improves the learners' own understanding of the material and has a huge positive impact on novices, who receive free 1:1 tutoring. Lastly, this form of assessment is naturally difficult to cheat -- a critical property for assessments in the era of large-language models. We use AVT in a randomised control trial with learners in a CS1 course at an R1 university. The learners provide tutoring sessions to more novice students taking a lagged online version of the same course. We show that learners who do an AVT session before the course exam performed 20 to 30 percentage points better than the class average on several questions. Moreover, compared to students who did a practice exam, the AVT learners enjoyed their experience more and were twice as likely to study for their teaching session. We believe AVT is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams.

Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment

TL;DR

Assessment via Teaching is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams and is shown to be naturally difficult to cheat.

Abstract

We propose and carry-out a novel method of formative assessment called Assessment via Teaching (AVT), in which learners demonstrate their understanding of CS1 topics by tutoring more novice students. AVT has powerful benefits over traditional forms of assessment: it is centered around service to others and is highly rewarding for the learners who teach. Moreover, teaching greatly improves the learners' own understanding of the material and has a huge positive impact on novices, who receive free 1:1 tutoring. Lastly, this form of assessment is naturally difficult to cheat -- a critical property for assessments in the era of large-language models. We use AVT in a randomised control trial with learners in a CS1 course at an R1 university. The learners provide tutoring sessions to more novice students taking a lagged online version of the same course. We show that learners who do an AVT session before the course exam performed 20 to 30 percentage points better than the class average on several questions. Moreover, compared to students who did a practice exam, the AVT learners enjoyed their experience more and were twice as likely to study for their teaching session. We believe AVT is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams.
Paper Structure (32 sections, 3 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 32 sections, 3 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related work
  3. Formative assessment
  4. Student-led teaching
  5. Impact of 1:1 help to novice students
  6. Assessment via Teaching (AVT)
  7. Benefits of AVT
  8. Fulfilling and motivating for learners
  9. Naturally formative feedback
  10. Repeatable test
  11. Impactful 1:1 help for novices
  12. Hard to over-optimise or cheat
  13. Case Study: AVT in a CS1 Course
  14. Experimental Setup
  15. Outcome variables
  16. ...and 17 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: An overview of Assessment via Teaching (AVT). Colour fill of each character indicates understanding of material.
  • Figure 2: The AVT group preforms better on the relevant exam question compared to class average and as good as the practice exam group. This isn't due to a selection bias between the course ($\mathrm{Control}_C$) and experiment ($\mathrm{Control}_S$) populations.
  • Figure 3: Learners are both more motivated to prepare for AVT sessions and enjoy the sessions more compared to doing a traditional practice exam session.