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Creativity and Rationale pp 171–196Cite as

Using Rationale to Assist Student Cognitive and Intellectual Development

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Part of the Human–Computer Interaction Series book series (HCIS,volume 20)

Abstract

One of the questions posed at the National Science Foundation ­(NSF)-sponsored workshop on Creativity and Rationale in Software Design was on the role of rationale in supporting idea generation in the classroom. College students often struggle with problems where more than one possible solution exists. Part of the difficulty lies in the need for students to progress through different levels of development cognitively and intellectually before they can tackle creative problem solving. Argumentation-based rationale provides a natural mechanism for representing problems, candidate solutions, criteria, and arguments relating those criteria to the candidate solutions. Explicitly expressing rationale for their work encourages students to reflect on why they made their choices, and to actively consider multiple alternatives. We report on an experiment performed during a Data Structures course where students captured rationale.

Keywords

  • Design rationale
  • Creativity
  • Student cognitive development

This work was supported by NSF CAREER Award CCF-0844638 (Burge). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

We would like to thank the students taking the Data Structures course for their willingness to participate in this experiment, and fellow participants in the workshop on Creativity and Rationale in Software Design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Miami University, 205W Benton Hall, Oxford, OH, USA

    Janet E. Burge & Bo Brinkman

Authors
  1. Janet E. Burge
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  2. Bo Brinkman
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Correspondence to Janet E. Burge .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Sciences and Tech, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park 332, Pennsylvania, 16802, Pennsylvania, USA

    John M. Carroll

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Burge, J.E., Brinkman, B. (2013). Using Rationale to Assist Student Cognitive and Intellectual Development. In: Carroll, J. (eds) Creativity and Rationale. Human–Computer Interaction Series, vol 20. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4111-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4111-2_9

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