CIC: Semester 1, Week 10: CSEd Research

This week you will get some practice in reading, summarising and writing about educational research articles. You’ll focus on relating findings from research articles to your own work. 

1. Identify a computer science education topic which is relevant to your portfolio. Use Elicit or Consensus to generate a summary of what is known in this area so far. It also gives you a list of articles to help you find out more. Remember, as this is an AI tool, the summary may not be accurate, but Elicit does quite a good job of being transparent to let you check it for yourself by following up on the articles yourself. If you prefer not to use an AI tool you can find a repository of CSEd articles here.

   

2. Select one article to review. You’re unlikely to find an exact match of a paper which is about exactly your topic, with your audience. Don’t worry, it makes it easier for you to do critical analysis! 
3. Read the article you have chosen and make notes. Think about what lessons you can learn from the findings in this article if you were designing materials for the same age group or topic. Do the ideas in the “Further work” section inspire you? 
4. Generate a summary of the article using ELM or a similar tool. How does this compare to your own understanding of the article? Is the summary accurate? Does it miss out key information?
5. Write a discussion post (or create a cloud document which you can share in class) in which you briefly summarise the findings of the article you reviewed, and summarise the lessons you think can be learned from them in your own work.  Use your own words. If you include text from an AI tool, clearly mark it.
   1. Summary – in your summary you should tell the reader about the purpose of the research, the skills they wanted to teach, the target audience, how it was evaluated (and with whom) and the key findings. You can also give your opinion about the reliability of the findings, e.g. noting methodology problems. 
   2. Lessons learned – This is the point where you tell the reader how what the researchers did relates to your own work. Perhaps it will help you to decide on a teaching approach, maybe it will make you adapt your draft materials to take one of the findings into account, or maybe you need to consider to what extent the findings apply for your target topic or audience. 
6. Have a go at marking your summary using the marking scheme (Educational Materials section)

Class slides

Semster1Week10.pptx