Bringing Reflection into Computer Science Education

Computer Science is a rapidly changing field where code bases and development strategies can change in months even if core concepts stay largely the same. In order to prepare our students for this environment we need to enable them to learn on their own and this concept appears in the literature as self-directed or self-regulated learning (SRL). The literature on SRL suggests that reflection is one of the most effective ways of promoting SRL. Reflective diaries, blogs, journals and questionnaires have all been used successfully in fields from the humanities to medicine to engineering to encourage students to engage in SRL. We believe that reflection has not caught on in CS as heavily as in some other fields because our students dismiss these common methods of reflection as mere busy work. The benefit of reflection, however, is not the writing itself but the process of thinking about and analyzing the actions and experiences of learning in order to master them. With this BOF we will describe reflection and its use in CS and start a discussion of reflective exercises relevant to computer science. As an example, students can reflect on how they learn new material by creating YouTube tutorials for others and adding to community knowledge. The intended result of this BOF is to begin the development of a repository of reflective activities that can be used in computer science classes.