Impact of Supplemental Instruction Sessions on the stress levels & time spent on homework assignments by the students : A case study

Sushma Anand Akoju

Sep 2023 - May 2024

Note:

The website follows a predefined template for Teaching As a Research course projects @ CIRTL, University of Arizona.

Since the use of Internet sources and AI tools for homework assignments by the students, is an evolving topic and most people are not well acquainted and/or due to other competitive situations, I included an elaborate background in Background section. This is about impacts of stress levels and other consequences students experienced due to competitive, collaborative and individual learning environments.

Background

Foundational theory courses in Computer Science are mandatory courses for the students enrolled in Computer Science Undergraduate and Graduate programs. One such foundational Undergraduate course is CSC 473 Automata, Grammars and Languages. This is a course that is theory-intense, requiring understanding of types of languages, syntactic & semantic properties of languages, theory of computation and complexity of the computational methods that recognize and/or decide a language.

The solutions to the theory questions/problems, are standardized to test the comprehension of the students and has a limited scope to the variations in the already standardized solutions that are experts' agreed. However such a restriction is often challenged by the solutions that exist on the Internet with/without sufficient justification and alignment with the steps in solving the problem to match the available solution. The votes given by the internet users to the answers often represent voted answers as more reliable and seemingly correct. [28] It is not surprising to note the use of the internet sources and AI tools in an era where students are used to accessing internet since a very early age. The homework problems are ideally expected to be answered by referring to the class lecture notes & supplemental materials provided in the course syllabus, with little to no use of internet.

Multiple Choice Question versus the "correct" answer from the internet search:

Given a correct solution, the goal of finding the steps to solve a problem such that it matches the correct solution, can become a more stressful goal to a learner. Such a goal depends on the complexity of the topic and/or the question as well as the comprehension of the concepts. For example, if there was a Multiple choice Question (MCQ), with set of answer choices, then unless one has good comprehension of the steps to solve and verify each one of the answer choices, it would remain a challenging & time consuming task. In a way, searching solutions for a homework problem on the internet, is similar to solving an MCQ. In short what type of learning does the task, of finding a correct solution from internet search or the use of AI tools, provide to the learner?

Alignment of internet solutions back to the lecture materials and the impacts on the students:

During the Fall semester of 2023 for CSC 473 class, students shared their challenges that they faced such as increased stress levels, spending more time on homework assignments due to external factors. Students came up with questions such as how to align an internet solution back to the lecture materials. [16] There are several internet resources such as StackOverflow, and paid resources such as Chegg, Studocu etc and AI tools such as ChatGPT, that impact how the homework assignments are solved. [4][7][8][12][13] [22][23][25][28] As per a recent study (2024) of a group of students, approx. 46.9% students used Large Language Models (LLMs) for college work. [32] Students also are unclear about what constitutes the use of LLMs as unethical. AI detectors (AI tools that detect AI-generated texts) differentiated between human and AI-written texts, with 88% accuracy. [32]

When the learner has access to the possibly correct solution before the learner has solved a homework assignment problem, then that might inhibit the chances to fully engage in - applying their knowledge & comprehension of lecture materials and learning from their mistakes.[1] This could have positive as well as negative effects. Positive effects include showing good comprehension of the learner where the learner is able to explain how and why the solution from the internet is indeed correct or not. Negative effects that fail to justify the why and how the internet answer is correct or not.[22][23][25] Some students of CSC 473 reported the high stress levels when they were unable to justify/comprehend the voted solutions available on the internet.

Research study among the students who generate their own answers VS who copied answers from internet sources:

Based on a study from Rutger's University [31], students benefited from homework when they generated their own answers. The students who copied answers from the internet sources did not benefit from answering the homework correctly and saw poor performance on the tests. Percentage of students who did not benefit from correctly answering a homework has increased in the past decade. [31] The study reports long-term harm that adversely impacts information retention and test performance (with negative impact to the letter grades) among the students reported they did not benefit from homework and relied on the internet for answers. [31]

Impacts of Community-based Question Answering (CQA) to the Undergraduate and Graduate level courses:

One of the free internet sources for finding homework problem solutions is StackOverflow which is a Community-based Question Answering (CQA) website. [28] The CQA website answers provide user-votes & feedback from expert users/top ranked users (e.g. STEM professor, STEM graduate) and topic-based tags, but they lack information if the voted answer or user's question is for an undergraduate or graduate level course which depend on different learning goals and outcomes. Besides, we generally expect to share a solution with an expert/teacher/grader for evaluation if the answer was correct rather than that of with a learner for evaluation.

Option paralysis and impacts of the choosing from multiple methods for solving a problem:

In addition to the aforementioned challenges, internet has multiple methods for solving a problem. Some students shared a feedback that they spent additional 3 to 4 hours finding the "right" or "easy" method to solve the homework assignment problem that caused more stress to the students. Besides, methods found on the internet may or may not align with that of the methods discussed in the lecture materials. There are several open-ended questions to assess an individual learning process in this specific scenario of applying a method found on the internet to solve a homework problem. Undergraduate students, seem to report certain concerns w.r.t pace, increased anxiety levels from some of earlier studies, for introductory courses during the semester. Students cannot disregard. [26][29]

Individual, Competitive and Collaborative learning methodologies & peer pressure:

There is a need for emphasis about: when to focus on individual learning versus competitive and/or collaborative learning. [19][20] Learners are under constant pressure from competitive environments but to not only do well in the subject but also do better than their peers. [30] This also requires additional preparation from the Instructor or Teaching Assistant, about the available internet sources and AI tools to proactively evaluate and be well-equipped to provide feedback when grading the homework assignments.

The aforementioned challenges, emphasize one thing with certainty based on students' feedback: there is an increase in stress level as well as longer amounts of time spent in solving homework problems.

The motivation and goal for Teaching as a Research (TAR) Project:

To address the aforementioned problems, I was keen to help students with Supplemental Instruction (SI) sessions such that the sessions are part of the syllabus and were more structured so they get a chance to apply the information learned from the lectures. By introducing a guided & collaborative practice/SI session, I may help - to improve the comprehension of the students, reduce stress levels and reduce amount of time spent on homework assignments.

I, as a Teaching Assistant for CSC 473, worked on weekly practice sessions preparation and execution of sessions, to study if the practice sessions helped the students reduce stress and amount of time spent in solving homework assignments. This project is part of a course "Teaching as a Research", IA 699, from Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), University of Arizona.

Introduction

Evidence-based teaching and Learning [2][3]

"How does this solution align with class lectures?"

Homework assignments [15][16] are feedback-based learning tools that assess the comprehension of the students.
Teaching methodology is based on active learning and feedback-based learning.
University of Arizona follows evidence-based teaching and learning [2][3].
Challenge: The idea of learning from looking at correct answers (responses), seems to introduce a challenge in measuring a student's comprehension of the lecture materials. [1]
Competitive versus collaborative versus individual learning activities are at the core of learning methodologies. [19] [20] The increase in stress levels during Covid-19 and post-Covid phases is evident. [26][27]
An important feature of the homework assignment problems in theory courses are that they focus on problem-solving and hence measuring the comprehension of the concepts and application of the knowledge learned. [23][25]
At the course level, undergrad and graduate courses differ by the syllabus, level of complexity, course modules, learning goals, learning outcomes etc.
A graduate student is expected to demonstrate advanced knowledge in comparison to that of a junior or a senior year student. At the subject level, question might remain same for both the undergrad and graduate level course homework assignments.

Image Credits: Bloom's taxonomy revisited

Challenges from solutions available on the Internet and AI tools as Situational Factors

Voted solutions with some basic explanations are available on the internet. [21][22][23][24][25]
- - - Stackoverflow (free online question/answer website for nearly any topic/subject),
    - Paid services such as Chegg, Studocu etc. [4][7][8][12][13][19][23][24][25]
    - ChatGPT & AI tools [9][10][11][13][17]
The submitted homework assignments that seem to refer internet or ChatGPT /AI tools are often noted by the graders. [17]
There are challenges between competitive versus collaborative versus individual learning in Computer Science. There is a need to bring all three forms of learning together with the application of the best of all three forms. [19][20]
The internet sources such as StackOverflow are Community-based Question Answering (CQA) websites.[28] The CQA website answers are user-voted and are aligned to specific topics in a subject by labels/tags (topic modeling) and are not aligned to the scope of a course i.e. undergraduate or graduate level.[28]
This is because, the main goal of such websites is to know if an answer to a question has a greater number of upvotes in comparison to that of down votes and if the answer was submitted and/or voted by a subject expert (example: STEM professor).
Image Credits: Best AI tools for Students 2024

What is a Supplemental Instruction Session?

A Supplemental Instruction (SI) session is a free out-of-class session that is designed to help the students learn how to apply the information learned in the class. [14] SI sessions are additional practice, learning and/or revisions sessions. Commonly, SI Sessions help with additional practice with problem solving, revision of the lecture topics, preparation for tests/exams and answering the students' questions. [18] University of Arizona provides free access to Supplemental Instruction (SI) sessions that are led by Teaching Assistants or trained students.

The Teaching-as-a-research (TAR) project is to study if the SI sessions help in the reduction of stress and reduction of amount of time spent on homework assignments in the course CSC 473 Automata Grammars and Languages, Spring 2024.

The SI sessions were optional in Fall semester 2023 and for Spring 2024, more changes in the format of the SI sessions were introduced. I worked as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the same course, during Fall 2023. Based on the feedback received from Fall semester, the SI sessions were made part of syllabus, although optional for Spring semester 2024.

Teaching As a Research (TAR) Project

During the Spring semester, 2024, we introduced few changes to the SI session format, which attempts to address concerns regarding students' high stress levels and longer duration of time spent on the homework assignments. I shared the feedback I received from the students from my Office hours as well as SI sessions from Fall 2023, with the professor.

Prof. Cesim Erten provided changes towards the design of the SI sessions and included them as part of the class syllabus during Spring 2024. Prof. Cesim Erten taught CS 473 during Fall 2023 & Spring 2024 semesters during which I worked as a Teaching Assistant. I worked with professor under guided supervision for the preparation and execution of the SI sessions.

We used the interactive classroom activities with learners and the instructors likewise. Based on the situational factors and best practices from Bloom’s taxonomy, there is an emphasis to practice by first understanding before remembering the method & steps to solve the problem. The theoretical subjects are generally not easy to self-verify if a concept was well-understood or not. Thus TAR project is designed to combine the concepts learned in the IA 699 course with that of design and application of SI sessions that align with CSC 473 course requirements.

We expect the SI/practice sessions would address the challenges from Fall semester 2023, since they are guided and collaborative in nature. [5][6] We ask the students to exchange the solutions between the peers during the SI sessions. We provide corrections, additional explanations and revisions as needed. The SI sessions could help to reduce both the stress levels and amount of time spent solving homework assignments of the learners. [14][16][18]

Changes in design of the SI sessions for Spring 2024, CSC 473 for the TAR project

During Spring 2024, the goal of the SI sessions was to verify if those students who did attend SI Sessions, have:

experienced less additional stress from homework assignments,
spent less time solving the homework assignments.

We ask all students to enter this information for each one of Homework assignments 3, 4 & 5.

We compare the two groups: students who did attend SI sessions versus students who did not. The TAR question is described in following section.

TAR Question

Do students who attend SI sessions, of CSC 473 course, demonstrate significant improvement in time spent and reduction in stress when solving homework assignments 3, 4 & 5 compared to those who didn't attend?

Learning Goals and Outcomes

Based on the feedback and surveys from the Fall 2023, we streamlined Supplemental Instruction (SI) sessions as Practice/Discussion sessions for Spring 2024. The design, weekly preparation and execution of the SI sessions are supervised by the Professor.

Learning goals:

To provide additional practice for the students with the help of SI sessions.

Learning Outcomes:

The students spent less time and experienced reduced stress levels in solving a problem due to the SI sessions.

Type of Assessment:

Formative assessment, since there is no grade or reward for merely attending practice sessions. However, there are other summative assessments included in the syllabus but is out of scope of this project.

Approach / Methods

The modified SI session design and activities are:

We f0llow the weekly SI session preparation cycle as per following flowchart in Figure 1.
For the sessions, I revise the concepts and prepare solutions for the practice problems.
During the sessions, we take the attendance and we ask the students to work in groups of 2-4 members [5].
We time the attempts so the student groups would have enough time to discuss and solve.
We ask students to volunteer to write down the solutions for the problems they attempted.
We provide feedback, revise concepts as needed and answer any student's questions.

Homework assignments considered for the TAR project are: 3,4 and 5.
We conduct a data analysis and we chose to conduct a qualitative analysis.

Figure 1: Weekly SI session preparation Cycle, Spring 2024, CSC 473

About the Data Analysis Plan and the Results

The learning outcome assessed for TAR question is:

Students who attend the SI sessions will:

1- reduce additional stress level (Likert scale 1-5)
2- reduce time spent on assignment (self-reported time)
3- score higher on homework (D2L)

Data collection:

For collecting the stress level information from the students, we asked students by a survey to rate their stress levels between 1 to 5, where 1/5 is low and 5/5 is high stress rating.
Students reported their answers to survey questions as part of their homework assignment submissions.
Also this was based on additional comments emphasizing the type of stress that students experienced.

Data Analysis changes:

We grouped stress ratings of 1 to 5 into 3 Stress levels as follows:

Rating of 1,2 into Low,
Rating of 3 into Moderate,
Rating 4,5 into High

Qualitative Analysis Results

There are a total of 14 SI sessions. We collected information for 3 Homework assignments.
Stress levels, and amount of time spent are "reported" values, so values are approximate.
There are two groups: Students who attended SI session versus who did not.
There are 3 stress levels: High, medium and low stress levels.
Amount of time spent on homework is recorded in hours.
The assumption of equality of variances between two groups does not hold.
Both Welch's t-tests, ANOVA and Welch's ANOVA tests are inconclusive due to lack of statistical significance and small class-wise sample sizes.
Fisher's exact tests: Since sample size < 1000 and frequency is also < 5 for more 20% of the samples, but tests are also inconclusive due to smaller sample sizes of the groups.

Data Visualization and Data Analysis Results for Homework assignments

3,4 & 5

Figure 2: Percentage of students attending SI sessions for Homework assignments 3,4 & 5

We note an increase in percentage of students attending SI sessions for Homework assignment 3, but for 4 and 5 there is relatively lower percentage of participation in the SI sessions.

We also note the period after mid-semester shows a certain trend of other factors, such as midterms, mid-semester project works in other courses and so on.

Figure 3: Stress levels across Homework assignments 3,4 & 5

Stress levels vary among three homework assignments between the students who did attend SI sessions and who did not.

There are high, medium and low stress levels. Among each group of students who attended SI session & did not attend SI session, the percentage of the students with each one of three stress levels are marked.

As this homework assignment 4 also includes spring break, the stress levels are higher for the students who did not attend the SI session due to the external factors such as going on a vacation etc. This contradicts the assumption that "spring break might lead to reduced stress levels and less time spent on homework assignments".

Although homework assignment 5 is closer to the 2nd midterm exam, the stress levels are moderate among the students who attended the SI session.

Figure 4: Total time spent in solving each one of the Homework assignments 3,4 & 5

For each homework assignment, the percentage of students and the amount of time spent in hours for solving each one of the 3 homework assignments, among the students who attended SI sessions versus who did not, are marked.

This plot shows that attending SI session may be associated with that of the amount of time spent on homework. Students who attended SI sessions spent relatively lower amount of time in comparison to students who did not attend the SI sessions.

And homework assignment 4 also includes Spring break, there maybe influence of the external factors such as going on a vacation etc. Contrary to the assumption that spring break etc could reduce amount of time spent on homework assignments, the data shows that students who attended SI sessions, spent more time during the spring break solving homework assignment 4. But students who did not attend SI sessions, spent relatively less time in solving homework assignment 4 but experienced higher stress levels as seen in Figure 3.

Discussion & lessons learned from the TAR project

What worked well?

We found that the students who attended SI sessions experienced relatively lower stress levels as well as the amount of time spent on a homework assignment is relatively less in comparison to that of students who did not attend the SI sessions.
Having a conversation as a Teaching Assistant, with the students, during Office hours and/or SI sessions was helpful to provide feedback both for the exams and next SI sessions (for example since we only target to solve a set of selected problems during SI sessions, we may receive a request to revise topic 2 that was already covered with an example problem in previous SI session). This was just for myself to understand how well my Office hours and SI sessions help the students.
We observed that the students who did attend the SI sessions also attended most of the classes, most of the Office hours of that of the Instructor and the Teaching Assistant.
Some students attended most of the SI sessions. Some students referred SI session solutions even though they could not attend the sessions.
The additional efforts of the repeating weekly SI sessions preparation was successful.
Following the organizational processes & policies and going by incremental steps to complete the project, went well, despite the other outside challenges.

Known challenges before conducting the study:

Small sample sizes to conduct any statistical analysis.
Stress levels, and amount of time spent are "reported" values, so values are approximate.
The average weekly SI session attendance is approximately 19% of number of students enrolled in the class.
Some students referred SI session notes when they could not attend the SI session.
Each homework assignment has different level of difficulty depending on the topics that need to be covered.
Each homework assignment has a number of questions that require more effort or level of complexity.

What challenges did you have during and after conducting the study?

More students wanted to attend SI sessions but could not attend. They recommended online or repeated SI sessions.
We expected statistical analysis may be inconclusive due to smaller sample sizes prior to the data analysis, which is confirmed after we conducted the data analysis.
Scores earned for homework assignments do not seem to have any association with a) student attending SI sessions, b) the amount of time spent on homework assignments and c) the stress levels.
Students hesitate to report online resources, including the use of ChatGPT.

What surprised you?

Some students who could not attend SI sessions, wanted a zoom or another SI session that is available to most students.
In addition to this, we found that we could have expanded the TAR project questions also to find out if students who did not attend SI sessions referred to the SI session materials and many other questions.
Since some students are more familiar with programming and had questions about how theory relates to applications and software programs, so I provided some programming examples to the students to explain what a Deterministic automata was, as a real life application. This is because some students seem to learn programming much earlier such as during High school before enrolling in an Undergraduate program.
I was also simultaneously enrolled into CSC 573 Theory of Computation course taught by Prof. Roberto Giacobazzi, University of Arizona. The subject deep dived into foundational concepts required for Graduate level course. Prof. Cesim Ertem and Prof. Roberto Giacobazzi also aligned concepts between both of the classes together. Together with such access to advanced, expert-guided learning, I had utilized and worked hard to seek better comprehension of the subject. The topics on theory of complexity and computation methods from CSC 573 was helpful to explain the concepts of decidable and recognizable languages for CSC 473.

What did you learn by doing TAR?

I learnt that teaching as a research is an ongoing learning goal that needs to be flexible.

How has this project informed how you will teach in the future?

The homework assignments could ask students to cite online resources used in solving homework assignments.
By inviting students to cite their internet resources/AI tools, we can also guide students to refer more relevant and qualitative resources from the Internet.
It might be helpful to ask students to explicitly share the prompts and help them with all three types of prompts.
Use of scaffolding: Prof. Cesim Ertem has already attempted to devise a scaffolding approach in creating rubric since Fall 2023.

What do you want to continue learning? What excites you?

To reduce the teacher-student communication gap through a formal surveys during the semester for some topics.
It was nice to prepare for the weekly SI sessions with multiple examples for explaining the concepts and exploring various approaches to explain same concepts. This was tricky since there is not too much time to explain same answer to a follow-up question differently than previously explained, during the Office hours or SI sessions. It helped me to expand and develop in-depth understanding of the subject and perspectives of the students. Explaining the same answer in different ways by adapting to the nature of the follow-up questions, was a challenging but interesting task.
It may be helpful to make SI sessions part of syllabus for the students in other theory courses.

What have you learned as an educator?

Most students did not know if the class would be challenging to them and if they needed any additional practice. There is a scope to proactively inform students and provide various learning tools and options to the students from the very beginning.
The only way to motivate students is by better scaffolding of the problem-solving approaches while taking incremental steps to help the students with improving the comprehension. (Added this as per Writing center's review comment).
- Example: Given a language description, to develop a tool to prove if the given language is decidable or not, requires answering multiple questions:
  - What is the exact encoding of the given language?
  - What are the example inputs?
  - Test various possible tools discussed in the classroom.
  - Apply the solution.
  - Prove that solution answers the question and vice-versa. (Language of the Machine simulated actually results in answering if the Machine can simulate the strings that belong to the language and prove the reverse direction. The machine here is a Turing Machine or a decider that takes an input string such as a word or a sentence as an input.)
I think there should have to be some form of continued practice sessions and a need to motivate students with extra credits or other types of academic rewards, which is not explored in this study.

Overall it was an enriching experience working on this TAR project. As a teacher, we have many chances to learn from these experiences, in general. But with TAR project, the teacher's learning also can be more structured and aligned with that of CIRTL, department policies, university's core values and teaching methods.

About the Author

Sushma Akoju, is a PhD Student. My research experience details are available at: orcid

Summary of my TA experience for CSC 473.

I believe teaching and learning experiences are best when learners and teachers are engaging in open conversations and when we work with each other to meet the learning goals.

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Special Acknowledgements

CIRTL & TAR project Instructors Kristin Winet and Byron Richard Hempel:

It was fun to be part of an enriching and supportive learning community such as CIRTL, University of Arizona. I am truly grateful to Kristin Winet and Byron Richard Hempel, for the support, guidance and learning experiences. Thanks to CIRTL!!

Professor CSC 473, Automata, Grammars and Languages, Prof. Cesim Erten:

The TAR project is small subset of overall course design and syllabus of CSC 473, Automata, Grammars and Languages. Although I actively participated during Office hours, answering students' questions while conducting Teaching Assistant (TA) duties, this project is heavily based on overall assessment, discussion with the Prof. Cesim Erten. I am grateful for the professor's support, guidance, encouragement to work on this project as a Teaching Assistant.

Students of CSC 473, Spring 2024 & Fall 2023:

Special thanks to all the students of CSC 473 during Spring 2024 as well as during Fall 2023.

I am grateful to receive active participation from the students of Spring 2024 semester and taking time to answer the questions related to this study for the homework assignments (3,4 & 5).

Professor CSC 573, Theory of Computation, Prof. Roberto Giacobazzi:

I was also simultaneously enrolled into CSC 573 Theory of Computation course taught by Prof. Roberto Giacobazzi, University of Arizona. The subject deep dived into foundational concepts required for Graduate level course. Prof. Cesim Ertem and Prof. Roberto Giacobazzi also aligned concepts between both of the classes together. Together with an access to advanced, expert-guided learning, I utilized the opportunity to bring the best of both courses as a Teaching Assistant. Grateful to be enrolled in CSC 573, while being a TA for CSC 473 and working on the TAR project.

Special Thanks to the Writing Center, University of Arizona (ThinkTank):

Thanks to Writing Center for proof reading this website.

TA Osho Sharma:

Thanks to Osho for assisting me with some parts of the SI sessions during Spring 2024.

TAR classmates:

Thanks to the classmates for the fun learning experience.

Recommendation

I recommend IA 699 Teaching As a Research course for any Teaching Assistants interested to pursue this amazing course for learning about teaching as a research.

I recommend CSC 473 Automata, Grammars and Languages course, University of Arizona, for future Undergrad students, as it is a very helpful course with great resources and tools to help students do well.

I recommend CSC 573 Theory of Computation course, University of Arizona, for Graduate students, for the enriching learning experience.

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