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

该项目属于“推进非正式 STEM 学习”计划，旨在设计、实施和评估一项旨在培养生产性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广泛关注：失败的经历往往非常消极，导致学生封闭、失去能动性、产生低自我效能感和习得性无助。过快地屈服于障碍是特别不幸的，因为有证据表明最初“犯错”最终会孕育出深入而持续的学习。为了了解学生如何充分利用富有成效的失败，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尝试改变其对学习障碍的处理方式。基于之前记录课后项目中讲故事实践的研究，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讲故事的富有成效的实践，在这个领域，专家们围绕错误（“bug”）进行坦诚、普遍和协作的讨论。这项研究将叙事分析、元认知反思和动机控制理论等领域结合在一起，在真实的计算机科学调试活动的背景下，开发了一个理论框架，它将对失败的富有成效的反应视为一个特定于学科的过程，作为一个社区反思如何定位障碍，如何构建关于为什么会出现这些障碍的因果理论，以及如何规划富有成效的反应。基于设计的研究方法将调查三个问题：（1）当学生和教师调试计算机代码中的错误时，干预措施对他们的行为和话语有何影响？ (2) 干预措施对学生和教师对他们之前的调试经验和一般失败的反思有什么影响？ (3) 教师发展工作对教师培养学生对失败富有成效的态度的能力有何影响？研究重点是 15 个夏季和周末编程研讨会，参加者为来自 STEM 领域通常代表性不足的人群的 5 至 8 年级学生。这些干预措施包括（a）为调试制定新的规范和实践，（b）教师教育，以及（c）编写软件，为学生提供有关其富有成效的努力的反馈。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以及半结构化访谈。措施将捕捉调试活动的变化、对调试的反思、学生关于毅力和成长心态的想法，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、微观纵向说明，说明实践社区如何改革其失败导向。这项工作的产品包括关于学习社区如何帮助学生对失败做出稳健而有效的反应的经验知识、理论和课程。这些内容将通过期刊、开源软件以及为从事青少年课外项目的研究人员和从业人员举办的研讨会/会议来传播。这些产品可能有助于探索课堂实践。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.