A Study of the Scrumage Teaching Approach: Student Learning and Attitude Changes

Best practices for teaching a diverse population include incorporating several modes of instruction, providing a variety of resources, and encouraging collaboration. However, traditional classroom management does not necessarily support these best practices. Scrumage (SCRUM for AGile Education) is a recently proposed classroom management technique in which students are given autonomy to choose individually from a variety of pedagogies (e.g., traditional lectures, active learning, a flipped-based approach, etc.), resulting in multiple simultaneous pedagogical methods in a single course. In addition, students in a Scrumage classroom must frequently reflect on the effects of their choices. In this work, we compare Scrumage and traditional sections of an introductory programming course. Scrumage students showed improved attitudes about learning, especially in the areas of Effort Regulation (perseverance in problem solving) and Control of Learning (taking responsibility for learning success). We believe that by promoting positive attitude changes and better content learning, Scrumage has potential for widening the retention of students in Computer Science.