CCSE Reading Group: What kind of research is (and is not) valued in the field of Computer Education Research?

Published: 4 October 2021

Steve and Joe explore research that is considered valuable in education research, eliciting extensive feedback from participants.

DATE: 4th October 2021
TIME: 14:00-15:00
LOCATION: CCSE Online Seminar Room
DESCRIPTION:

This session is about bringing out the spread of views within CCSE about what kinds of research are valued. (It is not a talk arguing for our own one true view.) There are different views on this if you hunt through the literature carefully enough, but the first thing to find out is what CCSE members think.

There are two separate reasons for having this session:

  1. Our personal reason is that we (Steve and Joe) are writing a provisionally accepted  paper about this in TOCE (the journal "ACM Transactions on Computing Education"), and to improve our paper we need to realise what different views naturally exist in our audience so that we can better understand how to be convincing to as many readers as possible.  When we have elicited this spread of views we will indicate our own key views so far; but if we run out of time in this session, then they can be presented at some future date -- or of course you can read them when the paper is finished for better or for worse.
  2. But the CCSE reason for this session is to get everyone to think about what they personally think is valuable research, and then having noted that to themselves, to hear the spread of views within CCSE.

The base question is: "What kind of research is (and is not) valued by you yourself in the field of Computer Education Research?". However if you also want to think about what is valued by others (e.g. your boss, editors of journals, etc.) you can give two different answers, or address only the angle that matters to you.

I hope that the sessions will alternate between short discussions in very small groups, and quick report-backs of ideas so far; then back to small groups to see whether seeing the range of others' answers changes anything for each of you.  It may well be that gradually a few main clusters of ideas emerge (we suspect this is true in the community of well-published CER researchers), but perhaps it isn't true of CCSE as a group.

Later on, if and when it seems appropriate, I'll have a few slides to indicate some of the main clusters, or opposites, which I think exist.  If however the discussion goes well, then I'll present these some other time.

First published: 4 October 2021

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Speakers: Dr Steve Draper & Dr Joseph Maguire