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

合作研究：调试失败：培养计算机科学领域的青年学术弹性

• 批准号: 1612770
• 负责人: Dor Abrahamson
• 金额: $ 62.05万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-15 至 2020-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1612770&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Debugging; Failure; Fostering

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.

该项目位于推进非正式STEM学习计划内，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的一个广泛关注：失败的经历往往是如此消极，以至于学生关闭，失去代理，发展低自我效能和习得性无助。太快地向障碍投降是特别不幸的，因为有证据表明，最初的“犯错”最终会培养深入和持续的学习。为了了解学生如何充分利用生产性失败，拟议的项目将研究包括中学生及其导师在内的实践社区如何试图改变其对学习障碍的处理。基于先前的研究记录了课后计划中的讲故事实践，该团队现在的目标是鼓励年轻学生在计算机科学中失败讲故事的富有成效的实践，在这个领域，专家们围绕错误（“错误”）进行坦率，普遍和合作的话语。将叙事分析，元认知反思和动机控制理论的领域放在一起，在真实的计算机科学调试活动的背景下，本研究开发了一个理论框架，该框架将对失败的生产性反应视为一个学科特定的反思过程，作为一个社区，如何定位障碍，如何构建关于这些障碍为何出现的因果理论，以及如何规划有效的应对措施。本研究以设计为基础，探讨三个问题：（1）当学生和教师在电脑程式中除错错误时，介入对他们的行动和话语有何影响？(2)干预措施对学生和教师反思他们以前的调试经验和失败的影响是什么？（3）教师在培养学生对失败的生产性态度方面的努力对教师的能力有什么影响？研究重点将是15个夏季和周末的编码研讨会，5 - 8年级的学生来自通常在STEM中代表性不足的人群。干预措施是（a）为调试设定新的规范和实践，（B）教师教育，以及（c）编写软件，为学生提供关于其生产性斗争的反馈。数据来源包括学习环境的视频和音频记录，活动期间产生的工件，以及半结构化访谈。措施将捕捉调试活动的变化，调试的反思，学生对勇气和成长心态的想法，以及教师的斗争和新课程的成功。实证结果将包括混合方法，微观纵向帐户的实践社区如何工作，以改革其导向失败。这项工作的产品包括经验知识，理论和课程学习社区如何帮助学生发展强大而有效的应对失败。这些将通过期刊，开源软件和研讨会/会议，为研究人员和从业人员与青少年课后计划工作传播。这些产品可能有助于在课堂上探索实践。这个项目是由9点社区学习中心，加州大学洛杉矶分校和加州大学伯克利分校进行。