Preview ICER 2016: Ebooks Design-Based Research and Replications in Assessment and Cognitive Load Studies

The International Computing Education Research (ICER) Conference 2016 is September 8-12 in Melbourne, Australia (see website here). There were 102 papers submitted, and 26 papers accepted for a 25% acceptance rate. Georgia Tech computing education researchers are justifiably proud — we submitted three papers to ICER 2016, and we had three acceptances. We’re over 10% of all papers at ICER 2016.

One of the papers extends the ebook work that I’ve reported on here (see here where we made them available and our paper on usability and usage from WiPSCE 2015). Identifying Design Principles for CS Teacher Ebooks through Design-Based Research (click on the title to get to the ACM DL page) by Barbara Ericson, Kantwon Rogers, Miranda Parker, Briana Morrison, and I use a Design-Based Research perspective on our ebooks work. We describe our theory for the ebooks, then describe the iterations of what we designed, what happened when we deployed (data-driven), and how we then re-designed.

Two of our papers are replication studies — so grateful to the ICER reviewers and communities for seeing the value of replication studies. The first is Replication, Validation, and Use of a Language Independent CS1 Knowledge Assessment by Miranda Parker, me, and Shelly Engleman. This is Miranda’s paper expanding on her SIGCSE 2016 poster introducing the SCS1 validated and language-independent measure of CS1 knowledge. The paper does a great survey of validated measures of learning, explains her process, and then presents what one can and can’t claim with a validated instrument.

The second is Learning Loops: A Replication Study Illuminates Impact of HS Courses by Briana Morrison, Adrienne Decker, and Lauren Margulieux. Briana and Lauren have both now left Georgia Tech, but they were still here when they did this paper, so we’re claiming them. Readers of this blog may recall Briana and Lauren’s confusing results from SIGCSE 2016 result that suggest that cognitive load in CS textual programming is so high that it blows away our experimental instructional treatments. Was that an aberration? With Adrienne Decker’s help (and student participants), they replicated the study. I’ll give away the bottom line: It wasn’t an aberration. One new finding is that students who did not have high school CS classes caught up with those who did in the experiment, with respect to understanding loops

We’re sending three of our Human-Centered Computing PhD students to the ICER 2016 Doctoral Consortium. These folks will be in the DC on Sept 8, and will present posters to the conference on Sept 9 afternoon.

• Barbara Ericson will be presenting her results with Dynamically Adaptive Parsons Problems. I’ve seen some of the pilot study results from this summer, and they’re fascinating.
• Amber Solomon is just starting her second year working with me. She did the evaluation on the AR Design Studio classroom. She (and I) is fascinated by Steve Cooper’s results from ICER 2015 where spatial reasoning training influenced CS performance and reduced SES differences. She’s been doing a study on CS grades, SES, and spatial reasoning in a non-majors class. She’ll be presenting on The Role of Spatial Reasoning in Learning Computer Science.
• Kayla DesPortes works with my colleague Betsy DiSalvo on the learning that happens in MakerSpaces. She’s designing new kinds of physical interfaces to reduce cognitive load and improve learning when working with electronics, which she’ll be talking about at her poster: Learning and Collaboration in Physical Computing.