COMPUTING EDUCATION RESEARCHTeaching the super profs to fish

to Fish My second reason for tweaking Scott’s question is inspired by a Chinese proverb: Give a person a fi sh and you feed that person for a day. Teach a person to fi sh and you feed that person for a lifetime. Telling the Super Profs about pair programming or any “best practices that have been shown to be effective” is just feeding them for a day (or perhaps a semester or two), whereas encouraging them to think about their teaching with a research mentality will allow them to steadily improve their teaching for the remainder of their careers. The important results thus far out of CSEd are negative results, which can be summarized thus – most of our folk pedagogic intuitions about how students learn computing are wrong. The Super Profs need to study their teaching. They need to formulate hypotheses, and construct their teaching and their grading to look for evidence for (or against) these hypotheses, then adjust their teaching accordingly. This is not an easy adjustment for a computing professor to make, as the research methods used in education are different from what most computing professors use – but hey – they are Super Profs! I also circumscribe my answer to Scott’s question to consider only novice programming, since that is my own research area, and I’ll focus on research that was done last millennium, since it has stood the test of time, and also because I don’t want to deal with any contemporary colleague who may feel left out of my list. Two good, highly readable places to start are the short review papers by Winslow (1996) and Clancy and Linn (1999). Early in their reading, the Super Profs should read some chapters from a book edited by Sally Fincher and Marian Petre (2004). The fi rst part of the book is a “how to” for education research, aimed at people who are thinking of CSED as a major research interest. I would not start the Super Profs on that part of the book, as my initial aim is simply get them to think about their teaching in a research oriented way (although they should eventually read that part). From the second part of the book, I’d have the Super Profs read the chapters written by Clancy (“Misconceptions and Attitudes that Interfere with Learning to Program”), Guzdial Last February, Scott Grissom posted an interesting question to the SIGCSEmembers list: