Why Discipline Matters in Computing Education Scholarship

Abstract

Scholarly communities in computing determine how to produce and validate knowledge within their domains of focus. Much of this knowledge can remain tacit because of shared ways of becoming a disciplinary scholar within any particular area of computing. But such tacitness presents challenges for computing education scholarship, since knowledge about how to create and validate claims about human thinking and learning is rarely a part of the training for computing educators. The editors-in-chief of TOCE have responded to these challenges by making explicit the epistemic practices associated with the publication of its manuscripts, by encouraging a range of borrowing from other disciplines, and by instituting feedback loops at all levels of review.

References

1. Bransford, J., Brown, A., and Cocking, R., Eds. 2000. How People Learn. National Academy Press.
2. Collins, H. and Evans, R. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. The University of Chicago Press.
3. Fincher, S. and Petre, M. 2004. Mapping the territory. In Computer Science Education Research, S. Fincher and M. Petre Eds. Taylor and Francis, Chapter 1, 1--8.
4. Glassick, C., Huber, M., and Maeroff, G. 1997. Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. Jossey Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA.
5. Knorr Cetina, K. 2007. Culture in global knowledge societies: Knowledge cultures and epistemic cultures. Interdisc. Sci. Rev. 32, 4, 361--375.
6. Lamont, M. 2009. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Harvard University Press.
7. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
8. McCartney, R. and Tenenberg, J. 2007a. From the editors: A new vision for JERIC. J. Educ. Res. Comput. 7, 1.
9. McCartney, R. and Tenenberg, J. 2007b. Why evidence? J. Educ. Res. Comput. 7, 2.
10. McCartney, R. and Tenenberg, J. 2008a. From conference to journal. J. Educ. Res. Comput. 7, 1.
11. McCartney, R. and Tenenberg, J. 2008b. Making it real. J. Educ. Res. Comput. 7, 3.
12. Polanyi, M. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday.
13. Shulman, L. 1986. Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educ. Research. 15, 2, 4--14.
14. Tenenberg, J. and McCartney, R. 2007. Linking questions and evidence. J. Educ. Resour. Comput. 7, 4.
15. Tenenberg, J. and McCartney, R. 2008. Grounding the scholarship of teaching and learning in practice. J. Educ. Resour. Comput. 8, 2.
16. Tenenberg, J. and McCartney, R. 2009. Introducing the ACM transactions on computing education. Trans. Comput. Educ. 9, 1.
17. Valentine, D. W. 2004. CS educational research: A meta-analysis of SIGCSE technical symposium proceedings. In Proceedings of the 35th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’04). 255--259.
18. Wolcott, H. 1992. What qualitative research has revealed about education’s researchers. In Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Symposium (AERA’92).

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing education

      • Computing education programs

        • Computer science education

      • Model curricula