The resources and tools on our site were initially created through the support of an NSF grant awarded to Dr. Adrienne Decker and Dr. Monica McGill. Part of our goal in establishing a resource center for users was to enable the advancement of primary and secondary computer science education research by meeting the needs of researchers, evaluators, stakeholders, and teachers through the provision of meaningful resources and tools. This project started in late 2016 and has been designed with input and continual feedback from many people in the computing education community. The non-profit organization Institute for Advancing Computing Education (IACE) grew out of the NSF grant. For more about this history, visit our About page.
Our primary outcomes were to support an increase in the quality and quantity of research and an increase in the types of best practices based on the most recent data for any given population in any part of the country/world. The project started with three pillars, evaluation instruments, article summaries, and research guides.
Evaluation Instruments
We house a full set of evaluation instruments that either have been used in computing education or may be of interest to the computing education community. The focus areas of these instruments are Computing, STEM, or General. Instruments in computing include those measuring cognitive abilities (knowledge and skills) and those measuring noncognitive factors (e.g. self-efficacy, grit, attitudes, etc.). For more information, visit the Evaluation Instruments Overview page.
Article Summaries
We have manually curated over 40 variables related to articles, including student demographic information, teacher demographic information, and information related to the curriculum/program delivered. For more information, visit the Article Summaries Overview page.
Research Guides
We provide a set of research guides that can be used when planning, implementing, and reporting on research studies. These can also be used to review articles for publication as well. We expect this set of guides to grow over the next few years.
Discussion Group
The CS Education Discussion Group is a weekly discussion group for those who would like to learn more about ongoing research in CS education and discuss it in the context of your own experiences and unique classroom settings. Led by IACE volunteer Dr. Emily Thomforde, these facilitated discussions bridge the known gap between research findings and classroom practices and provide a place for teachers to reflect on their own experience.
For more information, visit the Discussion Group page.
