| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 17, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 17, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1934975 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Allyson Kennedy
aykenned@nsf.gov (703)292-8905 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $98,987.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $98,987.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2601 WOLF VILLAGE WAY RALEIGH NC US 27695-0001 (919)515-2444 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
890 Oval Drive, Campus Box 8206 Raleigh NC US 27695-8206 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | IUSE |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001920DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
This four-institution collaborative grant aims to recruit and prepare undergraduate near-peers as Peer Teaching Fellows (PTFs) to provide scalable, high-quality support for students across computing pathways. It builds on a Google-funded grant that created a software environment to monitor in-person office hour interactions and online discussion forums. This effort aims to identify and support student help-seeking patterns specifically with respect to debugging practices across computing pathways. It will investigate the ways in which diverse students seek help in-person or online, increase the effectiveness of help-seeking interactions that focus on debugging, and create Peer Teacher development materials that support effective debugging help-seeking interactions.
The goal of the project is to design interventions that support debugging help-seeking interactions through PTF Development. The project team plans to utilize and refine existing data collection frameworks to gather data through office hours and discussion forums. It will create PTF development materials in a variety of contexts to help teach debugging skills, and analyze the impact of these materials and professional development. The researchers intend to build a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of researchers and practitioners who advance the state of knowledge and practice on recruiting and preparing PTFs to support diverse students across a spectrum of computing pathways to develop skills critical to independence and self-efficacy. The team will host a Peer Teaching Summit to disseminate development materials and other findings. Monthly team meetings will provide opportunities to discuss the data collected and develop common metrics and approaches for data analysis, in order to increase understanding of how and why interdisciplinary students seek help and how students approach debugging activities. Lastly, the PTF NIC and progress toward meeting project goals will be evaluated through frequent meetings with the advisory board. The project has the potential to advance the state of knowledge and practice around recruiting and preparing undergraduate near-peers as Peer Teaching Fellows to scale student support across computing pathways. It addresses the need to build a strong and diverse computing arm of the nation's STEM workforce. This IUSE: CUE project is co-funded by EHR/DUE and CISE Directorates CNS, CCF, IIS, and OAC, reflecting the project's alignment with the broader goals of the IUSE: EHR program in DUE and complementary programs in CISE.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project focused on training peer teaching fellows (PTFs) to better support students when students seek help with class materials. Our contribution to this effort included analyzing student performance and help seeking data (through office hours interactions and forum usage) and sharing data with our collaborators. We explored the utilization of help-seeking resources in two Computer Science (CS) courses and found that student help-seeking interactions vary depending upon the course structure and the students enrolled. Students who participate on the course discussion forum tend to perform better than students who do not and students with low confidence in CS skills in the CS2 class attend office hours more frequently. Practitioners can utilize these findings to make decisions about how to structure the help provided in their courses and determine interventions to support students that need more help. We also investigated common struggles CS2 students face while working on course projects and found that while a majority of students encounter struggles with time management and debugging of failing tests, students tend to emphasize wanting to improve their time management skills in future coding assignments.
Our results were disseminated to researchers and practitioners at the ACM SIGCSE Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (ITICSE) 2023, ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium in 2023 and 2022, American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference in 2022.
Last Modified: 08/29/2023
Modified by: Sarah Heckman
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