Increasing Student Performance thorugh the Use of Web Services in Introductory Programming Classrooms: Results from a Series of Qausi-Experiments

1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Historically, teaching introduction to programming can be challenging for both students and instructors for a variety of reasons from psychological to pedagogical (Sheil, 1981; Kolling et al., 1995; Huet et al., 2004; Pendergast, 2006; Avouris et al., 2010). This is also evident in the plethora of approaches from robots to games or different models of delivery (Lawhead et al., 2003; Rajaravivarma, 2005; Pedroni and Meyer, 2006). This paper describes a study that introduced Web services (WS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in Information Systems 1 (IS 1) / Computer Science 1 (CS 1) programming courses over a two-year period. The benefit of using the WS over a standard, typical IS1/CS1 teaching approach was evident in this study as seen in the increase in a common (no WS content) final exam performance at a large Midwestern University. While there are many factors that affect student performance in any course, there was a positive gain in WS sections over a typical section offering. This coupled with exposing students with a burgeoning technology used in the IT industry and, by their admission, tools that were interesting, we feel the study was successful and merits further study in the area. WS provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks (Booth et al. 2004). WS were chosen as a mechanism to increase student interest because of the ability to access familiar real world contents, such as a Google map or a Twitter feed, and bring this data into their assignments and projects. Furthermore, WS are becoming a strategic platform that supports how companies use IT to conduct business. Industry use of WS continues to grow as the benefit WS for standardizing the integration of applications to delivering more complex services (Gates, 2008; Laufmann, 2010; Phifer, 2012). According to a recent survey of industry professionals from both public and private sectors conducted in the fall of 2010 by the authors in support of this study, forty-one IT professionals from a broad range of organizations indicated that their companies were using WS (9 always use WS, 30 sometimes, 2 do not use WS) and that WS should be integrated into a university or college IT curriculum. As a follow-up to the survey, ten of the survey participants were interviewed during the spring of 2012. Over this two year period, the interviewees indicate that WS use in companies has 1) grown in the past two years, 2) become a strategic IT focus of the companies, and 3) shifted from not only working with custom WS but also using more third party and/or public facing WS across the entire organizations. To address the growing need for IT professionals to work in this space, the same interviewees supported 1) including WS as part of an IT curriculum, 2) having a class or classes focused on WS, and 3) ideally targeting upper level students with WS but possibly spreading throughout the curriculum when relevant. The findings lend support to the use of WS in the teaching approach outlined here. The WS approach to teaching IS1/CS1 integrates the use of WS technology throughout the course assignments and lectures. Students in the WS sections were shown to perform better on a common final exam then students in standard sections. The common final exam tested programming concepts and was given to all introductory sections. WS were not covered as part of the final exam. The approach provides students with an interesting collection of services that allows for more sophisticated apps to be built. Students using WS early in the course can see the benefits of reuse and, by the end of the course, build mashups that involve Google Maps, YouTube, Twitter, etc. as opposed to producing programs that may teach the same concepts but fail to allow students to connect their work to the real world. The results indicate that the approach presented here was successful and based on the outcome of this study, a framework that includes a comprehensive pre-test and posttest for students in the control and treatment sections to complete, a common content knowledge survey module for all students to take, and a faculty survey for the instructors to complete is proposed. …