Scaffolding is intended as a hands-on 'way in' to high-quality
CS Education research for Computer Science higher-education faculty.
Supported by a major grant from the
National Science Foundation (pending official
notification) and by Washington State's newly
established
Institute of Technology at the
University of Washington, Tacoma.
Scaffolding will use a workshop format to bring
practitioners and expert researchers together in order to initiate
principled, large-scale teaching and learning research. Participation
in Scaffolding involves:
- Attending an initial workshop which will introduce
techniques and methodologies in CS Ed research, help build
collaborative research relationships with other CS higher-ed
faculty, and introduce a shared research problem. This workshop
takes place June 13 - 18, 2003 in the Pacific Northwest of the
USA.
- Carrying out research during the following academic
year. Participants will gather data in their own universities
and keep in touch via the Internet.
- An interim meeting with participants from the
Bootstrapping
series of NSF-funded CS Education workshops at the
2004 SIGCSE
Symposium, providing links into an extended community
of CS Education researchers.
- Attending a capstone workshop in the Pacific
Northwest June 5 - 10, 2004 in order to share results,
analyze data, make plans for reporting and disseminating those
results in professional journals, and for collaborating on
follow-up research.
- A final meeting at the 2005 SIGCSE Symposium.
On completion of the program, participants should:
- have a respect for theory, evidence, multiple methods, and
honesty;
- have a model of what constitutes good research and good
research reporting;
- be able to frame research questions and have some idea about
how to find out how to investigate them;
- be able to conduct a study once specified;
- know where to go for additional discourse and support.
