Grace Xing Research Component

Feedback on paper

Overall feedback

  • The paper is well-written, carefully argued. Nice job being in dialogue with the literature.
  • We need more situated, sociocultural research on CT, especially in early childhood. The constructs you introduce here, including positioning and family systems, are promising.
  • My big ask: Where’s the CT? RQ1 asks about engagement, but not about CT learning itself. This probably isn’t going to be a study that argues for the effects of
  • Tell us more about the qualitative specifics of this case. May need more sociological theorization re: race, gender, class. to provide traction for positioning analysis.
  • As is often the case, maybe this paper wants to be several papers, each going deeper into a specific piece of what’s presented here?

RQs

  1. How do the interactions and dynamics within a family system—including father-daughters, mother-daughters, sibling interaction, and child individual characteristics—shape parental roles and influence young children’s engagement in informal CT learning? -> Are these interactions and dynamics?
  2. How does the primary participating parent position parental roles in supporting children’s CT learning during informal activities, and what new insights can be drawn? -> positioning to whom? In interviews, or to other participants in situ?

Background

Operational definition of CT: “the process of approaching problems through the conceptual foundations of computing, which involves systematic analysis and problem-solving across disciplines (Wing, 2006, 2011)”

  • What is the problem?
  • How is it modeled computationally?

Context

  • “parents and young children from underserved communities” What does “underserved” mean? Why does this matter? Neither race nor social class are part of the background/theoretical framework.
  • “provided accessible scaffolding for diverse learners” This is closely linked to Vygotskian ZPD framing; should be unpacked. What kind of scaffolding? It would be helpful to say a bit more about the toy, how children and parents interacted with it, how you mediated this interaction–all with regard to how such interactions constitute CT.
  • 15 hours of footage from one family? No (later) 3.7 hours of footage.

Positionality

  • “My prior involvement with the community, including volunteering on field trips, allowed me to establish rapport and trust with participants, creating a foundation for meaningful engagement.” This study focuses on one family; what’s your relationship with them like?
  • Should we think of you (the researcher) within the context of family systems theory? Were you implicated into “triangling”?
  • “debugging, problem-solving, and persistence” very different goals
  • Race is mentioned frequently as a category, but its contextual dynamics are not described. “Both girls attended a summer camp at the center—from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays—primarily serving local African American communities. Mary and David were the only White parents at the camp.” What was that like?

Data analysis

  • Why did you choose video data for RQ1? Does this mean you are privileging your interpretation of roles over participants’ accounts?
  • I don’t think grounded theory is suitable here. You have a pretty clear theoretical idea of what’s going on.
  • It would be helpful to give us counts of father-daughters and mother-daughter interactionss, as well as how you coded them, especially if you want to make the claim that certain roles were associated with children’s engagement.

Findings

RQ1

  • The second part of RQ1 asks how interactions affect children’s engagement in CT. This isn’t addressed, except in the +/- labels on tables. It would be helpful to walk us through some cases.
  • Do cultural understandings of STEM, CT, or CS play a role in positioning? How was the task itself positioned? (e.g. “So how much intervention should I have? Should I talk? Should I just stay quiet?”, “I’m allowed to help them, right? They don’t have to be able to do it independently?”, “It feels so long.” )
  • Is CT really just the context of the research. Is there an argument for why roles and interactions would be distinct for learning CT, compared to for example learning about cooking, health, genetics, or any other subject?
  • CT doesn’t feel alive as a sociocultural construct here; it feels like “content.” Is there a Vygotskian sociocultural manifestation of CT?
  • Consider research on “notional machine,” Wilkerson (2020) “Stories from the field”

RQ2

  • It would be helpful to understand more of the parents’ identities and pragmatic intentions with their positioning–isn’t positioning essentially rhetorical?
  • Woudl be heplful to consider intersection of cultural STEM, CT, CS narratives with race, class, gender in analyzing positioning.
  • I’m not so interested in whether parents’ account of their roles aligns with yours. I’m more interested in how parents position their activity and why.

Discussion

  • How can we strengthen the argument that this case is an example of something broader?