Research This! Questions that Computing Educators Most Want Computing Education Researchers to Answer
Paul C. Denny, Brett A. Becker, Michelle L. Craig, Greg Wilson, Piotr Banaszkiewicz · 2019
The goal of many computing education researchers is to improve how computing is taught and learned. To do that, researchers must engage with teachers, coaches, and mentors who design instructional materials and deliver lessons. However researchers may not be investigating problems that are directly of interest or utility to practitioners, and thus may not deliver results that are as impactful as possible in their contexts. To find out what research most interests today's practitioners, we conducted a two-stage survey. The first stage gathered questions that practitioners want researchers to investigate, and the second stage ranked these questions in terms of importance. We found that today's practitioners are more interested in student behavior, student understanding, and pedagogy than in languages and tools, curriculum, and inclusivity, and that there is little overlap between the questions ranked as highly interesting by researchers and those ranked highly by practitioners. Our results indicate that researchers need to better communicate why the questions they are pursuing are important, look for opportunities to collaborate with those who teach but have little direct connection with research, and examine the relevance of their research questions to practitioners.