Motivation 

Discuss the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary research, which requires navigating differences in theoretical and methodological approaches, and recommend strategies for conducting this work.

DBER

Discipline-based education research (DBER) focuses on understanding learning within a particular domain, such as biology or computer science. It requires, at minimum, four types of expertise: expertise in the domain, expertise in learning within the domain, expertise in learning more generally (i.e., cognition, motivation, etc.), and expertise in social science research methodology. Many DBERers do not attempt to develop all of these areas of expertise by themselves (though there are some superheroes who can magically stay up-to-date in four fields simultaneously). Instead, they opt to work with other researchers with complementary areas of expertise. Within these teams, each researcher likely knows at least a little bit about each area, but does not need to be an expert in all of them. Popular team compositions include a discipline-based education researcher (i.e., a domain expert who focuses on education within that domain) and a learning scientist.  Continue reading →

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Motivation 

To explore the efficacy different types of guidance during a constructive learning activity (self-explanation of the subgoals of a programming problem-solving procedure) in an online learning environment.

Self-explanation of subgoals

Self-explanation is exactly what it sounds like. It is the process of a learner explaining to themselves (i.e., using their prior knowledge, new information, and logic) something that they are learning. It has been consistently effective for learning, except in fields that do not follow logical rules (e.g., learning how to pronounce English words; Wylie & Chi, 2014). In this study, we explored whether learners could successfully self-explain the subgoals of a programming procedure. The fundamentals of subgoal learning are explained in this post about our 2016 Computer Science Education paper. Continue reading →