Collaborative Research: Debugging Failure: Fostering Youth Academic Resilience in Computer Science

该项目位于推进非正式STEM学习计划中，旨在设计、实施和评估旨在培养富有成效的失败实践文化的干预措施。该项目回应了教育研究和实践中一个广泛关注的问题：失败的经历往往是消极的，以至于学生们会自我封闭，失去能动性，产生低自我效能感和习得性无助感。过于迅速地向障碍投降尤其不幸，因为有证据表明，最初的“错误”最终会孕育出深入而持续的学习。为了了解学生如何最大限度地利用有效的失败，拟议的项目将研究一个包括中学生和他们的导师在内的实践社区如何试图改变其对学习障碍的处理。基于先前的研究，在课后项目中记录了讲故事的做法，该团队现在的目标是鼓励年轻学生在计算机科学中进行失败的讲故事的富有成效的实践，在这个领域，专家们对错误（“bug”）进行坦诚、普遍和协作的讨论。在真实的计算机科学调试活动的背景下，本研究将叙事分析、元认知反思和动机控制理论的领域整合在一起，开发了一个理论框架，将对失败的生产性反应视为一个学科特定的过程，该过程反映了如何定位障碍、如何构建关于这些障碍出现的原因的因果理论，以及如何规划生产性反应。基于设计的研究方法将调查三个问题：(1)当学生和教师在调试计算机代码错误时，干预措施对他们的行为和话语有什么影响？(2)干预措施对学生和教师对以往调试经验的反思和对失败的总体影响是什么？(3)教师发展努力对教师培养学生对失败的积极态度的能力有何影响？研究重点将是15个夏季和周末的编程研讨会，参与者是来自STEM领域代表性不足的5 -8年级学生。干预措施是(a)为调试设置新的规范和实践，(b)教师教育，以及(c)编写软件，为学生提供有关其生产斗争的反馈。数据源包括学习环境的视频和音频记录、活动期间产生的工件和半结构化访谈。这些措施将包括调试活动的变化、对调试的反思、学生对毅力和成长心态的看法，以及教师在新课程中的挣扎和成功。实证结果将包括混合方法，微观纵向帐户如何一个社区的实践工作，以改革其导向失败。这项工作的成果包括经验知识、理论和课程，关于学习社区如何帮助学生培养对失败的强大和有效的反应。这些将通过期刊、开源软件和研讨会/会议传播给从事青少年课外活动的研究人员和实践者。这些产品可能对课堂上的探索实践有用。该项目由9 Dots社区学习中心、加州大学洛杉矶分校和加州大学伯克利分校共同实施。

Situated within the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, this project Research in Service to Practice award seeks to design, implement, and evaluate an intervention aimed at fostering a culture of productive failure practices. The project responds to a broad concern in educational research and practice: Experiences of failure are frequently so negative that students shut down, lose agency, and develop low self-efficacy and learned helplessness. Surrendering too quickly to obstacles is particularly unfortunate, given evidence that initially "getting it wrong" ultimately breeds deep and sustained learning. In order to learn how students can make the most of productive failure, the proposed project will study how a community of practice that includes middle school youth and their mentors attempts to change its handling of learning obstacles. Building on prior research documenting storytelling practices in an afterschool program, the team now aims to embolden young students' productive practices of failure storytelling in computer science, a field in which experts practice candid, pervasive, and collaborative discourse around errors ("bugs"). Pulling together the domains of narrative analysis, meta-cognitive reflection, and control theories of motivation, within the context of authentic computer-science debugging activity, this study develops a theoretical framework that views productive responses to failure as a discipline-specific process of reflecting as a community on how to locate obstacles, how to construct causal theories about why those obstacles emerged, and how to plan productive responses. A design-based research approach will investigate three questions: (1) What is the impact of the interventions on students and instructors' actions and discourse when they are debugging errors in computer code? (2) What is the impact of the interventions on students and instructors' reflections back on their prior debugging experiences and on failure in general? and (3) What is the impact of the instructor-development efforts on the instructors' capacity to foster students' productive attitudes toward failure? The study focus will be 15 summer and weekend coding workshops with 5th-8th grade students from populations typically under-represented in STEM. The interventions are (a) setting new norms and practices for debugging, (b) instructor education, and (c) coding software that provides students with feedback on their productive struggle. Data sources include video and audio recordings of the learning environment, artifacts produced during the activities, and semi-structured interviews. Measures will capture variations in debugging activities, reflections on debugging, students' ideas about grit and growth mindset, and instructors' struggles and successes with the new curriculum. The empirical results will consist of mixed-methods, micro-longitudinal accounts of how a community of practice works to reform its orientation to failure.The products of this work include empirical knowledge, theory, and curriculum about how learning communities help students develop robust and efficient responses to failure. These will be disseminated through journals, open-source software, and workshops/conferences for researcher and practitioners working with youth afterschool programs. The products may be useful for exploring practices in the classroom. This project is being conducted by the 9 Dots Community Learning Center, UCLA and UC Berkeley.