CUE: Collaborative Research: Effective Peer Teaching Across Computing Pathways

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

This four-institution collaborative grant aims to recruit and prepare undergraduate near-peers as Peer Teaching Fellows (PTFs) to provide scalable, high-quality support for students across computing pathways. It builds on a Google-funded grant that created a software environment to monitor in-person office hour interactions and online discussion forums. This effort aims to identify and support student help-seeking patterns specifically with respect to debugging practices across computing pathways. It will investigate the ways in which diverse students seek help in-person or online, increase the effectiveness of help-seeking interactions that focus on debugging, and create Peer Teacher development materials that support effective debugging help-seeking interactions. The goal of the project is to design interventions that support debugging help-seeking interactions through PTF Development. The project team plans to utilize and refine existing data collection frameworks to gather data through office hours and discussion forums. It will create PTF development materials in a variety of contexts to help teach debugging skills, and analyze the impact of these materials and professional development. The researchers intend to build a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of researchers and practitioners who advance the state of knowledge and practice on recruiting and preparing PTFs to support diverse students across a spectrum of computing pathways to develop skills critical to independence and self-efficacy. The team will host a Peer Teaching Summit to disseminate development materials and other findings. Monthly team meetings will provide opportunities to discuss the data collected and develop common metrics and approaches for data analysis, in order to increase understanding of how and why interdisciplinary students seek help and how students approach debugging activities. Lastly, the PTF NIC and progress toward meeting project goals will be evaluated through frequent meetings with the advisory board. The project has the potential to advance the state of knowledge and practice around recruiting and preparing undergraduate near-peers as Peer Teaching Fellows to scale student support across computing pathways. It addresses the need to build a strong and diverse computing arm of the nation's STEM workforce. This IUSE: CUE project is co-funded by EHR/DUE and CISE Directorates CNS, CCF, IIS, and OAC, reflecting the project's alignment with the broader goals of the IUSE: EHR program in DUE and complementary programs in CISE. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.