Use in-class clicker questions to identify students struggling at the beginning of the course so you can reach out to them.

  • The data you collect from these clicker questions will help you gauge student comprehension of material.
  • Research suggests that students’ learning in the first few weeks of the course can strongly impact their subsequent performance.
  • Students who perform poorly in the beginning of the course tend to perform worse on the final exam.
  • The clicker questions that Porter, Zingaro, and Lister found to be most useful for identifying students who needed additional help in a CS1 class are as follows:
    • What is the value of x after this code runs? x = 0 if x < 5:     x = 4 if x > 2:     x = 1 else:     x = 3 A. 0 B. 1 C. 4 D. 3 E. 5
    • What is printed by this code (the value of sum)? lst = [ [2, 3, 4], [1, 1] ] sum = 0 for i in range(len(lst)):     for j in range(len(lst[0])):         sum = sum + lst[i][j] print(sum) A. 2 B. 7 C. 11 D. Error due to bad list reference
    • What is the output of this code? def calculate(w, x, y):     a = x     b = w + 1     return a + b + 3 print(calculate(3, 2, 0)) A. 5 B. 9 C. 0 D. 3
    • if temperature > 0:     print("above freezing") elif temperature == 0:     print("at freezing") else:     print("below freezing") Does the code below do exactly the same thing as the code above? if temperature > 0:     print("above freezing") elif temperature == 0:     print("at freezing") print("below freezing") A. Yes B. No
    • What is the output of this code? def a(num):     return val + num + 3 def b(val):     return a(1) print(b(2)) A. 6 B. 7 C. 4 D. 5 E. Error because of an undefined variable

More about this tip

External Source
"Predicting Student Success using Fine Grain Clicker Data" by Leo Porter, Daniel Zingaro, and Raymond Lister