Comments on: Sally Fincher on Useless Truths at SIGCSE 2010

By: Big-D “Design” for education and online courses: Let’s build more and different « Computing Education Blog

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:35:01 +0000

[...] was talking about in her SIGCSE keynote in 2010 — she called the research results “useless truths.”) Turadg argues that bridging the gap is a job for Design (Big-D “Design,” [...]

By: Mark Guzdial

Mark Guzdial — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:10:42 +0000

Sally has been working on design patterns for teaching for quite some time. She refers to them as “pedagogical patterns.” As she discussed in her talk, that’s exactly the kind of “story” that bridges from the abstract to the embodied. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=544482

By: Ben Chun

Ben Chun — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:27:12 +0000

And what if there were design patterns for teaching? I think Doug Lemov has at least the beginnings of something like that: http://itmoves.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/strategy-vs-technique/

By: Education Research is not equal to Teaching: A note to email correspondents « Computing Education Blog

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:16:22 +0000

[...] the teacher! A skilled teacher is a master at their craft. Teaching is an embodied practice, as Sally Fincher told us at the last SIGCSE Symposium. How can you judge that craft without seeing the practice, or inspecting the products (e.g., [...]

By: Tell Sally Your Stories: Monthly, For a Year « Computing Education Blog

Tell Sally Your Stories: Monthly, For a Year « Computing Education Blog — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:36:10 +0000

[...] 26, 2010 In her keynote as the Outstanding Contributions to CS Education awardee, Sally Fincher talked about the “useless truths” that education researchers publish. [...]

By: Mark Guzdial

Mark Guzdial — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:48:21 +0000

Raymond Lister just posted that the audio and slides from Sally’s SIGCSE 2010 talk are now available at: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/saf/sigcse-keynote/sigcse-keynote.html

By: William E. J. Doane PhD › Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2010

William E. J. Doane PhD › Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2010 — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:02:01 +0000

[...] would like to take the occasion to tip my hat to Sally Fincher, who gave one of the keynote talks at the 2010 SIGCSE conference in Milwaukee, WI and was, by many accounts, fantastic. I’ve [...]

By: Sally Fincher and women in computing education research for Ada Lovelace Day « Computing Education Blog

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:44:59 +0000

[...] wrote earlier this month, when Sally won the ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution in CS Education award, about her work with Disciplinary Commons with Josh Tennberg. Suffice to say here, there are [...]

By: Mark Guzdial

Mark Guzdial — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:11:34 +0000

It's a really interesting assessment question to ask, "What does it mean for design patterns to work?" For novices, we're most likely hoping that they gain some additional design insight. I built a case library design aid for students once, called STABLE, that did measurably influence students' design understanding -- but those were concrete examples, not abstracted patterns. I'm not convinced that you could measure much improvement in design understanding in novices with use of design, patterns. It's a completely different thing for experts. It's hard to measure increases in understanding or skill for experts -- by virtue of being experts, their levels are already beyond what our instruments (designed mostly for educational purposes, so novices) are designed to measure. Maybe that's not what we care about for experts, though. Maybe the fact that design patterns are just so popular is good enough. Causing dialogue about design is a good and useful thing in itself. I see Deborah's concern about forcing people down one path, and that would be interesting to explore. But from a social constructivist perspective, any discussion about design is better than no discussion.

By: Stacy Branham

Stacy Branham — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:41:59 +0000

Mark, I honestly don’t know if there is much evidence for either novices or experts. I have not actually read The Oregon Experiment (an extensive field test of The Pattern Language), which may be a good place to look. Also, Dearden and Finlay wrote an excellent journal paper on patterns in HCI (here: http://tinyurl.com/ygmunsj) that points to some positive studies involving novices and others including experts. But, I suppose these findings need more substantiation given the following concluding remark: “one of the most obvious weakness in HCI research on patterns is the lack of substantive evidence of their benefits for actual design practice.”

Best,
Stacy