Influence of Pedagogic Approaches and Learning Styles on Motivation and Educational Efficiency of Computer Science Students

Abstract

The classic didactic approach that has been applied in the classroom for learning algorithms focuses on the use of lectures combined with practical exercises. In our approach, we propose a novel way for learning algorithms through interactive and collaborative experimentation. Furthermore, as far as we know, there are no existing studies that analyze the relationships that these approaches may have with the three key components in the learning process: the student's learning style, motivation during the learning process, and educational efficiency. In this paper, we present an experiment carried out in the classroom for learning greedy algorithms, which studies these components on two didactic approaches: the first one based on active teaching methodology and the second one on traditional teaching methods.