Deconstruction of prior knowledge and visual narratives in Computing pedagogy

Evaluating students’ prior knowledge, particularly in higher education, has been a difficult task due to lack of any known reliable technique. This paper describes a research that involved a technology-enhanced approach for collecting prior knowledge data and presented those through visual narratives. The use of visual narratives is new in the research within engineering discipline, particularly in Computing. The study took place at a British university where forty five Computing students participated in the data collection process. The students were asked questions about their concepts around certain topics, academic interests, and assessment preferences. Data were collected using an online audience reply and analysis tool, Mentimeter, which also generated real time visuals, such as word clouds and graphs, based on the student responses. Several narratives were composed upon the findings depicted through the visuals. The key contribution of the research is a unique prior knowledge data analysis procedure which is convenient and effective in deciding pedagogic principles.