And chocolate, inevitably, reminds me of how hard it can be to conduct education research.

A few years back, I submitted a paper to SIGCSE and one of the comments I received back from a reviewer has stuck with me ever since. I’ve completely forgotten the details of the paper, but it presented some kind of teaching approach that could be used in the classroom. I had collected student survey data and reported that students enjoyed the experience. The reviewer dismissed the evaluation as largely irrelevant and stated: “If I gave out chocolate in my class then students would enjoy that too!”

Enjoyment is an important consideration, since the more that students enjoy something, the more likely they are to actually do it! But what they *do* has to be shown to be beneficial.

The more time that passes since I received that comment, the more I value it. With the perspective of distance, I’ve even come to use it as a yard-stick to measure my own research and that of others. Sure students enjoyed it – but is there evidence of some deeper and more significant benefit, or is it just chocolate? Students enjoy chocolate, but it isn’t a healthy option – too much of a good thing leaves no room for vegetables. What evidence do we have that the learning activity / software tool actually helps learning?

I recently pitched an experiment to a colleague of mine. I suggested that we could show that chocolate helped people learn how to program. In our classes, we have a big attendance problem, with less than 50% of students attending most of the time. I suggested that a free chocolate bar to each person might be sufficient motivation to get them into the class. If indeed, the chocolate was enough of a motivator to attend, and if lectures actually help students learn anything, then the class average might be higher than in previous years. In other words, offering students chocolate might produce a significant improvement in learning – perhaps a greater positive impact on learning than anything else I’ve tried recently. Unfortunately, getting the project funded is proving difficult.

I see a lot of papers that show how much student enjoy a given approach / tool. Some of them even show how it improves learning. They always make me think of chocolate.

Andrew

I became acutely aware of how many other researchers were struggling with the Ethics approval process when I was presenting a paper at ICER in 2008.  During question time, the topic of Ethics approval was raised and I mentioned that we had obtained “blanket” approval to look at exam scripts (and any other exam data, such as results) of any student within our department.  We could use this data to answer any interesting research question that might arise, without having to seek consent from individual students.  I explained that it was considered to be archival data that we (as teachers in the department) already had access to, so no special consent was required.

That got a round of applause.  Not for the research, but for the ethics approval we obtained.  I must admit to being somewhat surprised at the time, but having had numerous discussions about various Ethics Committees since, I am no longer surprised.  Feelings about the Ethics approval process run deep.  And they are not positive feelings.

I continued to complain to my colleagues about why the Ethics committee held up my research for petty, inconsequential reasons.  I lamented the fact that the committee obviously consisted of idiots!

Then I became one of them.  I joined the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee in the middle of 2012.

I still complain to my colleagues.  But now I complain about why researchers can’t follow simple instructions, and why they submit incomplete and inconsistent applications. I lament the fact that so many researchers are idiots!

That is not entirely true.  The statistics produced by the Ethics committee in my institution show approximately a third of applications are approved immediately, a third are approved on condition that minor changes are made, and a third have major issues that require resubmission.  The majority of applications have no major problems.  But there are also some very poorly thought out proposals.

I’ve come to think of the Ethics approval process as being essential.  It acts (in part) as a gatekeeper to make sure researchers are not likely to do something that has serious unanticipated consequences.  No doubt that doesn’t apply to your research – it certainly doesn’t apply to my research, which is always without risk to anyone involved.  But it does apply to some of the research.

I haven’t been on the committee very long, and I have already seen some applications that make me wonder.  For example, one researcher (from Fine Arts) wanted to take photographs of children for a photographic study on identity.  The photographs were to be taken in the researchers own home and required the children to undergo numerous costume changes.  Once taken, the photographs were to become the property of the researcher, to edit/modify as they desired and could be sold at a later date.  Another researcher wanted to interview workers that had been injured on building sites (and would assure the workers of confidentiality), but then intended to show the interview transcripts to the company health and safety officer for editing and approval before they were used in research.

Could anything go wrong in either of these projects?  Would you approve them?

Andrew Luxton-Reilly

My name is Andrew Luxton-Reilly (originally Andrew Luxton, but I changed my name when I married, much to the surprise of my students).  I came from a background in the liberal arts, studying subjects like Media, Ancient History, Psychology and Philosophy and I loved it.   I completed a Masters of Arts in Philosophy before eventually conceding that a more applied subject would improve my career opportunities.  I was fortunate to be finishing my studies at a time when student numbers in Computer Science were growing rapidly and I fell into a teaching position in the Computer Science Department at The University of Auckland in New Zealand, more by accident than by design.  I have been a member of the faculty since 1995, but spent the first 10 years teaching, and have only been involved in Computer Science Education Research since 2005.

The majority of my research has related to Contributing Student Pedagogies, which bring the ideas of user-generated content into the Educational ambit.  More recently, I’ve become interested in trying to describe and measure the various things that make programming code difficult to understand.  I’ve also been involved in a few ITiCSE working groups, which I highly recommend to anyone who gets the chance.

I’ve been teaching what are considered to be large classes by our standards, averaging around 400 students (although before the decline in CS enrolments some classes peaked at almost 850 students).  Most of this teaching has been with novice programmers, either in CS0, CS1 or CS2.   Although I love teaching the introductory sequence, I was gratified to have had the opportunity this year to develop and teach a new graduate course in Computing Education.

A new role that I’ve taken on recently has been membership in the University of Auckland Human Participant Ethics Committee – in other words, the institutional ethics review board.  I’ve only been on the committee for a few months so far, but it is fascinating to be on the other side of the fence when it comes to approving research studies.  I expect to write more on some of the issues that arise in future.

It is almost Christmas, which means long days on the beach and BBQs in the sun.  Once again, I have to explain to my (5 yr old) son that it won’t snow on Christmas, regardless of what he sees on cards, books, TV shows, movies and merchandise.  What is normal for one culture doesn’t always apply in another, and it is only through exposure to a diversity of views that we realize how much we inherit from tradition, and how different things could be!

I hope that my contributions here will add to the diversity of views on CS Education from around the world – but not until I get back from my summer holidays

Ciao,
Andrew