Journey to a PhD – The Renegade Coder

You might have heard that I completed my PhD in engineering education. In order to accomplish that goal, I had to write a dissertation. Of course, those aren't always digestible, so I wanted to put together an nice piece for the average person. Quick Overview To give you an idea of what I studied in a few hundred words, I've put together this short Q&A section. What Did I Study? At a high level, I looked at value congruence, which is a fancy word for the match between an individual's values and the values of their organization. In the case of my work, I looked at the connection between undergraduate computer science students' values and the values of their institution. Ultimately, I found that computer science students mostly believe that their values do not align with the values of their institution. A more nuanced look at the data would show that students believed they shared values with their institution in some ways (e.g., reasons for taking summer classes) and not others (e.g., kinds of resources and expectations of students). More work should be done to explore these gaps in depth. Why Did I Study Value Congruence? The purpose of studying value congruence was to uncover any gaps in values between students and their institution. By identifying these gaps, we would be better prepared to address them. One of the main findings of the study was that students valued the practitioner environment (i.e., industry) while they did not believe their institution did. While I did not explore further to find why students felt this way, it's not too hard to brainstorm up a few possibilities (e.g., a heavy focus on theory in the curriculum, an overall lack of open-ended software development, little use of industry standard tools, etc.). I also found more specific instances of gaps. For example, students deeply valued friends as a resource, but they did not believe their institution did. Likewise, students believed that their institution deeply valued textbooks while they did not. In the latter case, I argue that institutions should consider finding ways to make textbooks more valuable to students or getting rid of their use altogether. How Did I Study Value Congruence? To get at value congruence, I used a technique known as ethnography. In ethnography, the researcher embeds themself in the context of their work. In the case of my study, I was interested in student values, so I studied those values in the context of the classroom. Overall, I worked with a little over a dozen students over the course of an entire semester to unpack the culture of computer science education. Most folks reading this article might be surprised to hear that I do qualitative research. Generally, value congruence is assessed quantitatively through surveys, but I opted for a more intimate approach. Specifically, I got to know several students over the course of a semester, and they helped me put together my fieldnotes and analysis. As a result, I am able to point to gaps in value congruence from a big picture level (e.g., students deeply value their social environments while they do not believe their institution does) all the way down to individual instances (e.g., students do not care about office hours while they believe their institution does). Study Highlights Now that you have a feel for what I studied, I wanted to share some of my favorite parts. First, I like to share this graph, which shows the overall "votes" for particular items in a domain. Don't worry if anything in that last sentence makes any sense. The graph will clear things up. In this plot, you can see that everything in blue is student-sided while everything in red is institution-sided. In this case, students are seen caring about resources like friends, YouTube videos, slides, and practice exams. Meanwhile, the institution is shown caring about textbooks, readings, instructors, and homework. I love this plot because it so clearly shows the divide between students and their institution. Students seemingly have very different values than their institution (at least as they believe it). However, without this plot, we could only speculate on the degree of value incongruence. In addition to the plot, I have some wonderful quotes from students. For instance, I asked one student why he didn't personally share values with his institution, and he got to talking about why he didn't value office hours: So [the instructor] was a bit blunt, and he was always complaining about how noone came to his office hours like no one, you know, answered questions when heasked the question, right? So, maybe they just didn't like the way he spoke, sothey didn't communicate with them. I quite like this quote because it illustrates the deeper rationale behind students' disdain for office hours. In this case, the quote gives us a real look into what students experience, and it's something that I think a lot of students across the country can identify with (i.e., some professors are just not approachable). Yet, students are clearly getting that message that office hours are important. This shows up again and again in my work as students even say things like "I should be attending office hours" and "I know office hours are important." To me, that means that messaging isn't enough to get students to hold certain values if there are real world barriers in the way. At any rate, I'm going to keep this one short and sweet. I could honestly write about my work for hours, which I did! The final document came out to 190 pages, and I probably could have kept adding to it. At some point, you'll be able to read the document yourself through the ETD site, but it seems to take a while to publish. If you're stuck waiting like me, feel free to browse some of these related articles in the meantime: All But Dissertation: The Light at the End of the Tunnel 9 Things I Wish I Knew About Doctoral Programs I Successfully Completed My PhD in Engineering Education Otherwise, take care! I'll see you next time.