In need of a Base Case
Comments about coding, research and life

This is a tag cloud created from the quotes I have gathered so far in this research.

So after two readings of the papers I have come up with the following categories, 6 in total.

Societal Implications - the student directed a statement about or to society adn the necessity for understanding. (”Thus it makes no sense that as people we choose to remain ignorant of such precautions to protect (our) personal data” 10-C)

Broader CS Concepts - the student made reference to or recognized tha applicability of a CS concept within their life (”Overall I would have to say that I found the book to be very interesting. It really gets you thinking about the roles of computers in every day life” 35-A)

Liked Anyway - I suspect this is a subcategory of a larger “enjoyed assignment” category. These quotes are students who voiced displeasure about the assignment, but indicated after the reading that it was worthwhile. (”I must say that at first I was really angry that I had to read a book and write some paper about it in programming class…, but I’m glad I got a chance to read this book because it was actually very interesting” 16-A)

General Inspiration - not a major category, however it is useful as a repository for inspirational quotes. (”If we cant ask important questions we cant proceed” 15-B)

Negative Comments - again a minor category but can be useful over time to weed out poorly chosen books. (”The book sounded like it was written for just computer scientists because of the technical words and technical software company products described. This gave the reader a sense of disability of not knowing what was going on.” 1B)

Programming - this category is for statements made that indicate or make reference to a programming concept covered within the class. (quote 39B - waiting for the paper to unvail this one)

So continuing work..
1 - reexamine the statements already gathered to make sure that they still fit in the better defined categories.
2 - reexamine statements to see if they belong to multiple categories.
3 - re-code documents to see if more statements emerge now that categories are better defined.

onward..

Ok, I have finished the second read of the papers. Here are my current statistics.

38 out of 71 papers contain qualifying remarks (4 papers were disqualified due to a lack of following directions in the assignment - they wrote a plot summary).

There are 61 quotes that I used to create categories on these two passes.

The current categories I am working with (although sub categories are starting to emerge) include: Societal implications (21%), Broader CS concepts (28%), Liked Anyway (18%), developers (3%), General Inspirations (5%), Negative Comments (5%), and Programming Related (20%)

I am going to give them a few days to not be so fresh in my mind and then resort again, looking for quotes that have multiple category associations. I have a feeling that societal implications and broader CS concepts are going to have a number of overlaps (programming related aslo) and thereby increase the percentages for those categories.

I also want to start to give the data some flavor. So up until this point I have been working with the papers in isolation - no gender, age, or major information. I want to go back and see if there is any significant correlations between these subgroups and the categories I observed from the general population.

I’m about halfway through “The Discovery of Grounded Theory” and “Computer Science Education Research”. Next on my list is Studying the Novice programmer and another Sally Fincher book. I also have “How People Learn” and a re-read in “The Art of Changing the Brain” in order to continue with this strand of research.

I really need to go buy my own copy of the two books I am currently reading. I keep wanting to highlight and annotate in margins, and I’m afraid I will lose some of my connective thoughts (and thereby paper references) if I dont actually write this stuff down.

I’ve also created a couple of ACM binders containing relevant articles that I’m working through as well.

Progress!!!

.. dont you hate it when you get your hands on a book you really wanted, and then dont really have time to dig into it until several hours later?

I picked up a copy of The Discovery of Grounded Theory from the library today and am not going to have time until maybe tomorrow night to look at it. Probably not until Friday.

Oh well..

At least the things on my todo list are interesting!

So heres a current picture of my white board. Contained on it are the post it notes in an original sorting. I’m labeling it as an original sorting because its just my first brush with the information. I’m going to leave them like that for a day and then look again at the categories I have found.

Currently they include: Societal Implications (directives made by students similar to all people need to know about computer security), Broader CS Concepts (statements about arousing interest in a sub field of cs), Programming (perceived applications to programming concepts they have studied in class), liked anyway (liking the book despite a statement about not wanting to do the assignment), and then some random miscellaneous statements that I don’t know where they fit yet.

Within the next couple of weeks I should get another round of papers, but I am also going to go back and read the papers I have.