Improving Learning Outcomes by Labeling Slides Based on the Complexity of Their Content

Abstract

Often, university professors tend to create slides that blend introductory, intermediate, and advanced content. The introductory content is necessary to understand the intermediate, and the intermediate is in turn necessary to comprehend the advanced. However, typically, it is left to the students to decide which part of the material is basic, which is intermediate, and which is advanced. However, many times, the professor doesn't even consider the possibility of addressing those advanced topics, but doesn't want to remove such material because a few students who are more advanced might benefit from it. Furthermore, the professor even loses a lot of class time explaining material that few students are prepared to understand, as they are still grasping the most basic concepts.

This article analyzes the outcome of labeling each slide in a university-level Object-Oriented Programming course with tags such as introductory, intermediate, or advanced. These results are comparatively analyzed with other outcomes obtained in other courses taken by the same students, where the slides have not been labeled.