Join us to discuss using theory in Computing Education Research, 7th September at 11am

cc-licensed image from the thenounproject.com/term/theory/2332503/

Join us on Monday 7th September to discuss using theory in Computing Education Research at 11am. We’ll be talking about a paper [1] by Greg L. Nelson and Amy Ko at the University of Washington:

A primary goal of computing education research is to discover designs that produce better learning of computing. In this pursuit, we have increasingly drawn upon theories from learning science and education research, recognising the potential benefits of optimising our search for better designs by leveraging the predictions of general theories of learning. In this paper, we contribute an argument that theory can also inhibit our community’s search for better designs. We present three inhibitions: 1) our desire to both advance explanatory theory and advance design splits our attention, which prevents us from excelling at both; 2) our emphasis on applying and refining general theories of learning is done at the expense of domain-specific theories of computer science knowledge, and 3) our use of theory as a critical lens in peer review prevents the publication of designs that may accelerate design progress. We present several recommendations for how to improve our use of theory, viewing it as just one of many sources of design insight in pursuit of improving learning of computing.

Details of the zoom meeting will be posted on our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com. If you don’t have access to the workspace, send me (Duncan Hull) an email to request an invite to join the workspace.

References

  1. Greg L. Nelson and Andrew Ko (2018) On Use of Theory in Computing Education Research in ICER ’18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, August 2018 Pages 31–39 DOI:10.1145/3230977.3230992