Apply Small Teaching Tactics in an Introductory Programming Course: Impact on Learning Performance

Small teaching approaches are well-structured, incremental teaching improvement techniques supported by research in cognitive science, memory, and learning. I systematically implement a series of small teaching activities in an introductory programming course to tackle the teaching and learning challenges faced by instructors and students. The small teaching activities are designed to promote effective learning strategies such as knowledge retrieval, spacing-out practice, and interleaving learning. I examine the impact of such approaches on students’ performance through comparative analyses. The test results indicate that small teaching approaches are effective in improving students’ lower- and higher-level thinking skills and help boost students’ long-term knowledge retention. Because the small teaching approaches are flexible and easy to implement, instructors teaching technical information systems topics can quickly integrate at least some small teaching activities into their classes