ICER Acceptance
Paul Denny, Brett Becker, Michelle Craig, Piotr Banaszkiewicz, and I were very pleased to receive notice last week that ICER 2019 has accepted our paper exploring the questions people would most like computing education researchers to answer. To recap:
- We asked one group of people what questions they would most like answered, then
- grouped and collated those questions, and
- asked a larger group of people how important or unimportant they thought those questions were.
We also asked respondents about their backgrounds and whether they teach and/or do research. The most surprising finding was how little overlap there was between the interests of people who do research and the interests of people who don’t:
| Most Interesting to Researchers | Most Interesting to Non-Researchers | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | What fundamental programming concepts are the most challenging for students? | How and when is it best to give students feedback on their code to improve learning? |
| 2. | What teaching strategies are most effective when dealing with a wide range of prior experience in introductory programming classes? | What kinds of programming exercises are most effective when teaching students Computer Science? |
| 3. | What affects students' ability to generalize from simple programming examples? | What are the relative merits of project-based learning, lecturing, and active learning for students learning computing? |
| 4. | What teaching practices are most effective for teaching computing to children? | What is the most effective way to provide feedback to students in programming classes? |
| 5. | What kinds of problems do students in programming classes find most engaging? | What do people find most difficult when breaking problems down into smaller tasks while programming? |
| 6. | What are the most effective ways to teach programming to various groups? | What are the key concepts that students need to understand in introductory computing classes? |
| 7. | What are the most effective ways to scale computing education to reach the general student population? | What are the most effective ways to develop computing competency among students in non-computing disciplines? |
| 8. | What is the best order in which to teach basic computing concepts and skills? |
(The imbalance in numbers is an artefact of how we did the analysis.) We will post a preprint as soon as we’ve addressed the reviewers’ comments; if you are coming to Toronto for the conference, please give me a shout—I’d be happy to show you around my adopted home town.