Conducting a social constructivist epistemology for students of computing disciplines

There have been some social constructivist learning approaches used in computing sciences (CS) education, but none of them has actually validated the student reflection process, which is a critical component of the action learning associated with them. The step of reflection within the social constructivist pedagogy has a crucial role in building the learner's mental model and in refining the existing mental model. This paper presents a novel research case study on the employment of an innovative process of student reflection and analysis. This innovative process promotes a unique, non-traditional approach of employing a social interaction based dialogue of inquiry that helps engage each learner in a self-reflective assessment prior to the action learning. The process is in line with the social constructivist model that is based upon inquiry based knowledge building. It helps students debug their conceptual understandings, which make up their respective cognitive models. It also enables them to identify problems or limitations within that mental model before the actual knowledge assimilation or accommodation takes place. The presented case study strives to address a key issue of the social constructivist model i.e. how to ensure that students successfully self-reflect upon what they are learning. In order to so, this research performs a comparative analysis between the results obtained through the presented social constructivist self-reflection assessment and the outcomes of a software based traditional assessment. This paper discusses and analyzes learning analytics data collected over several semesters from multiple instances of social constructivist epistemology conducted for students of two different computer programming classes at the CS1 and CS2 levels respectively. The main contributions of this research experiment are evaluations of the process of student reflection, validations of student assumptions and presentation of an authentic action-learning problem for students in the form of their conceptual gaps. The experimental findings represent evidences of successful validation of student beliefs as well as knowledge discovery process though an epistemic investigation.