What Computing Education Research does that Engineering Ed and Physics Ed Research doesn’t

In my most recent recent Blog@CACM post on last month’s ACM Ed Council meeting, I mentioned that I gave a talk about the differences between computing education research and engineering education research (EER) and physics education research (PER). Let me spell these out a bit here.

The context was a panel on how to grow computing education research (CER). We were asked to consider the issue of getting more respect for computing education research (an issue I’ve written on before). I decided to explore the characteristics of CER that are important and that are not present in EER or PER. Engineering Education Research (EER) and Physics Education Research (PER) are better established and more well-respected in the United States.  But I’ve come to realize that CER has characteristics that are different from what’s in EER and PER.

Engineering Education Research

I came to a new understanding of EER because of a cross-campus STEM Education Research seminar that we’re holding at Georgia Tech this semester. It’s given me the opportunity to spend a couple hours each week with people who publish in Journal of Engineering Education (see here), review for them, and edit for them. JEE is generally considered to top EER journal.

If you’re not familiar, engineering education research is a big deal in the United States. There are well-funded engineering education research centers. There are three academic departments of EER. It’s well-established.

In one of the early sessions, we talked about the McCracken Study (Mike McCracken has been coming to the sessions, which has been great), where an experimental assignment was used in five classes in four countries. Are there similar studies in EER? Our EER colleagues looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders. For the most part, EER studies occur in individual classes at individual institutions. Laboratory studies are rare. International collaborations are really rare.

I started digging into JEE. The last issue of JEE only had papers by American authors from American institutions. I’m digging further back. My colleagues are right — international authors and collaborations are unusual in JEE.

In contrast, I don’t think that the ACM Transactions on Computing Education has ever had an only-American issue. Our ICER conference is not even American-dominated. The ICER 2014 best paper award went to a paper by Leo Porter (American) who worked with Raymond Lister (Australian) using data collected from Daniel Zingaro’s classroom (at U. Toronto in Canada) to address a theory by Anthony Robins (New Zealand).  We use classroom studies, laboratories studies, and frequently use multi-institutional, multi-national (MIMN) collaborative studies (and study how to conduct them well).

Physics Education Research

At the January workshop on CER that Steve Cooper organized (paper to appear in CACM next month — it’s where Eric Roberts gave a keynote that I wrote about here), Carl Wieman was the opening keynote speaker. He talked about the hot issues in physics education research.

After his talk, he was asked about how physics education researchers were dealing with the gender skew in physics and about improving access in K-12 to quality educational opportunities. If you look at Brian Danielak’s visualization of AP CS test data, you’ll see that CS is the most gender-skewed, but Physics follows closely after.  (Click on the picture to get a bigger version, and look at the lower left-hand corner.)

 

Carl said that gender diversity just wasn’t a priority in PER. I dug into the PER groups around the US. From what I could find, he’s right. Eric Mazur’s group has one paper on this issue, from 2006 (see here). I couldn’t find any at U. Washington or at Boulder. There probably is work on gender diversity in physics education research, but it certainly doesn’t stand out like the broadening participation in computing effort in the United States (see papers listing from Google Scholar).  The January workshop really brought home for me that a key characteristic of CER, particularly in comparison with PER, is an emphasis on broadening participation, on social justice, on improving the diversity of the field, and guaranteeing access to quality educational opportunities for all.

I don’t have a deep bottom-line here. It was only a few minute talk. My exploration of EER and PER gave me a new appreciation that CER has something special. It’s not as big or established as EER or PER, but we’re collaborative, international, working on hard and important problems, and using a wide variety of methods, from in-classroom to laboratory studies. That’s pretty cool.