Designing CS Education Research to Meet Your Needs

Are you looking to learn more about developing and executing research plans to best meet the needs of your CS education projects? Utilizing case studies from the evaluation research group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center intermixed with hands-on activities, this workshop will help you along your research or program evaluation journey! As a workshop participant, you will work through guided practice activities in small groups to deepen your understanding of how to design research and evaluation methods for your program. Key takeaways from this tutorial will be the steps and considerations for developing a research or evaluation plan that aligns data collection activities and analysis to your research or evaluation questions. Instrumentation will also be shared throughout, with participants taking away examples of surveys and interview protocols that have been effectively used by the team at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Resources will also be provided on how to find additional instruments and how to assess and repurpose those for your projects. This tutorial will help you determine which data is most critical to collect and which methods are best suited for collecting that data based on your participants and program needs and resources.