Using theory to inform capacity-building: Bootstrapping communities of practice in computer science education research

In this paper, we describe our efforts in the deliberate creation of a community of practice of researchers in computer science education (CSEd). We understand community of practice in the sense in which Wenger describes it, whereby the community is characterized by mutual engagement in a joint enterprise that gives rise to a shared repertoire of knowledge, artefacts, and practices. We first identify CSEd as a research field in which no shared paradigm exists, and then we describe the Bootstrapping project, its metaphor, structure, rationale, and delivery, as designed to create a community of practice of CSEd researchers. Features of other projects are also outlined that have similar aims of capacity building in disciplinary-specific pedagogic enquiry. A theoretically derived framework for evaluating the success of endeavours of this type is then presented, and we report the results from an empirical study. We conclude with four open questions for our project and others like it: Where is the locus of a community of practice? Who are the core members? Do capacity-building models transfer to other disciplines? Can our theoretically motivated measures of success apply to other projects of the same nature

Cause for alarm?: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students' understanding of software design and software design criteria. Students were recruited at two levels: those termed 'first competency' programmers, and those completing their Bachelor degrees. The study, including participants from 21 institutions over the academic year 2003/4, aimed to examine students' ability to generate software designs, to elicit students' understanding and valuation of key design activities, and to examine whether students at different stages in their undergraduate education display different understanding of software design. Differences were found in participants' recognition of ambiguity in requirements; in their use of formal (and semi-formal) design representation and in their prioritisation of design criteria

Designerly Ways of Being

In this paper, we inquire into the stances that designers take in their design activities. The setting in which we investigate this question is that of design critiques, where participants make their stances publicly available to one another. During a critique, participants use their bodies as a framework for mutual orientation and reference. Design concepts are not so much told as they are staged and performed, using multiple semiotic modalities, including gesture, speech, gaze, orientation, inscription, and artifact. In performing their design, participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which we call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal. During the critique, designers often mirror the stances of others, where failing to do so can lead to communication breakdown. Although analyzed in the social setting of the design critique, because these stances are made public, they can thus become internal resources that designers draw upon in design situations in which others are not present. Rather than representing epistemic states or “designerly ways of knowing,” we suggest that these stances represent “designerly ways of being.

Novice Learner Experiences in Software Development: A Study of Freshman Undergraduates

This paper presents a study that is part of a larger research project aimed at addressing the gap in the provision of educational software development processes for freshman, novice undergraduate learners, to improve proficiency levels. With the aim of understanding how such learners problem solve in software development in the absence of a formal process, this case study examines the experiences and depth of learning acquired by a sample set of novice undergraduates. A novel adaption of the Kirkpatrick framework known as AKM-SOLO is used to frame the evaluation. The study finds that without the scaffolding of an appropriate structured development process tailored to novices, students are in danger of failing to engage with the problem solving skills necessary for software development, particularly the skill of designing solutions prior to coding. It also finds that this lack of engagement directly impacts their affective state on the course and continues to negatively impact their proficiency and affective state in the second year of their studies leading to just under half of students surveyed being unsure if they wish to pursue a career in software development when they graduate

Dunning–Kruger effects in face perception

The Dunning–Kruger Effect refers to a common failure of metacognitive insight in which people who are incompetent in a given domain are unaware of their incompetence. This effect has been found in a wide range of tasks, raising the question of whether there is any ‘special’ domain in which it is not found. One plausible candidate is face perception, which has sometimes been thought to be ‘special’. To test this possibility, we assessed participants' insight into their own face perception abilities (self-estimates) and those of other people (peer estimates). We found classic Dunning–Kruger Effects in matching tasks for unfamiliar identity, familiar identity, gaze direction, and emotional expression. Low performers overestimated themselves, and high performers underestimated themselves. Interestingly, participants' self-estimates were more stable across tasks than their actual performance. In addition, peer estimates revealed a consistent egocentric bias. High performers attributed higher accuracy to other people than did low performers. We conclude that metacognitive insight into face perception abilities is limited and subject to systematic biases. Our findings urge caution when interpreting self-report measures of face perception ability. They also reveal a fundamental source of uncertainty in social interactions

Warren's Question

In this paper, we present an extended examination of a specific, single, instance of transfer of teaching practice. The investigation uses a combination of interpretative analytic techniques from critical literary studies, and grounded theory. From this analysis we make conjectures about some of the ways in which educators change their teaching practice and suggest that these natural practices hold a challenge both for computing education research and educational development

Opening the Door of the Computer Science Classroom: The Disciplinary Commons

... document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants’ classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions

A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students ’ understanding of software design and software design criteria. Student participants were recruited from two groups: students early in their degree studies and students completing their Bachelor degrees. Computer Science educators were also recruited as a comparison group. The study, including over 300 participants from 21 institutions in 4 countries, aimed to understand characteristics of student-generated software designs, to investigate student recognition of requirement ambiguities, and to elicit students ’ valuation of key design activities. The results indicate that with experience, students become more aware of ambiguous problem specifications and are able to address more of the requirements in their software designs, that they use fewer textual design notations and more graphical and standardized notations, that they systemically ignore groupings and interactions among the different parts of their designs, and that students change their valuation of key design activities in response to changes in problem-solving context.