Learning Programming Language in Higher Education for Sustainable Development: Point-Earning Bidding Method

Abstract

Promoting learning passion for students in higher education is a vital and challenging issue. Due to the swift changes in society and technology development, many convenient and interesting technologies increasingly interfere with students’ learning performances and reduce students’ motivation for attending classes. For example, mobile games and social networking have led students to lose their passion for learning. MAPS (Mind Mapping, Asking Questions, Presentation, Scaffolding Instruction) is a flipped teaching model which has been proved as an effective approach to increasing students’ reflective learning, allowing students to devote to self-learning and recovering their passion for learning. Thus, this study employed a MAPS teaching strategy that adopts a point-earning approach to encourage students to learn from peer feedback while the teacher can understand students’ learning from the process. When the class is over, students can exchange the points for other rewards through a bidding mechanism which encourages students to regain passion for learning. The concept of Scaffolding Instruction points out that allowing students to sense positive peer pressure, which is caused by their peers’ improvements, and the atmosphere where their peers are studying hard can enhance their learning motivation and reflection. The empirical results of this study found that peer assessment and feedback can improve the learning effectiveness of students with poor performance.