Using Automated Prompts for Student Reflection on Computer Security Concepts

Reflection is known to be an effective means to improve students' learning. In this paper, we aim to foster meaningful reflection via prompts in computer science courses with a significant practical, software development component. To this end we develop an instructional strategy and system that automatically delivers prompts to students based on their commits in a source code repository. The system allows for prompts that instigate reflection in students to be timely with respect to students' work, and delivered automatically, thus easily scaling up the strategy. In this paper, we describe the design of a rule-based prompt delivery system, including a list of security related reflection prompts. We collect preliminary evidence for the reflection strategy in a course targeting mobile development. The evaluation provides evidence that such a system can help realize a reflection-in-action instructional strategy at scale and improve students' learning.