Paper Info
Title
Qualitative Analysis of Open-ended Comments in Introductory CS Courses: (Abstract Only).
Abstract
End-of-course evaluations and other student surveys typically include the opportunity for students to provide free-form comments. These are rich sources of data but are often only subjectively taken into account to further improve course delivery or analyze the effectiveness of assignments. We designed several puzzle-based assignments for typical CS1/2 topics and surveyed students as part of our efforts to analyze the assignments' efficacy and improve them over time. The surveys included traditional measures such as demographic data, Likert-scaled questions about assignment perceptions, and open-ended comments. With thousands of survey responses, we wanted to see if the open-ended comments yield additional, statistically significant, insights on either the assignments or students' learning. We developed a coding scheme for the comments using grounded theory analysis to represent patterns among the data. After refining the coding scheme we statistically analyzed the comments and found some interesting relationships, not apparent from the Likert-scaled questions, among certain codes. We also conducted extensive semi-structured interviews with instructors and student teaching assistants, also using grounded theory analysis to develop a set of codes for these different perspectives. The coding processes themselves allowed for a deeper understanding of the concerns about and appreciation for the assignments from both groups of participants. This poster reports on how the statistical results and the coding schemes, including the overlap and dissonance between the two coding schemes, inform our continued efforts to improve both assignment development and future research on the teaching and learning of CS concepts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3159450.3162290
SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Baltimore Maryland USA February, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Computational thinking,qualitative analysis,CS 1/2,puzzles
Grounded theory,Cognitive dissonance,Computer science,Computational thinking,Knowledge management,Coding (social sciences),Mathematics education,Student teaching,Perception
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5103-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zack Butler124.41
Ivona Bezáková203.72
Kimberly Fluet301.01