Using Real-World Problems to Explore and Improve Students' Understanding of Parallelism Concepts

Students' conceptual knowledge about parallelism continues to grow because of the increasing infusion of parallelism topics in all courses, even if they are not dedicated to those topics. Most times, such infusion is through high-level theoretical problems, as listed in the textbooks. However, without providing corresponding real-life instances, such problems might not engage students with the content in such courses. Does providing real-life activities along with theoretical constructs help students to grasp such topics better? As an attempt to explore student comprehension of parallelism in such course scenarios, this paper describes an unplugged assignment, where students were asked to categorize their daily activities into concurrent and parallel tasks. The paper then presents a thematic analysis of student experience using three semesters' worth of student data. The analysis shows that, although students exhibit limited knowledge of parallelism in real-life situations and have numerous misconceptions about parallelism; their participation in such assignments are deliberate, their thinking processes are analytical, their writing skills in expressing such concept is limited and their impressions about such assignments are positive. The paper then presents an effort to enhance student's comprehension and shows how the intervention has improved students' understanding of this critical concept. This study confirms that it is essential to provide real-life analogies and examples to facilitate a greater understanding of parallelism. Because providing only theoretical examples might not engage a diverse body of students in courses that are just trying to expose students to this critical topic.