Narratives and Pathways of Computing Educators

Analysis approaches

The ITiCSE 2008 Working Group explored different approaches to analyzing the interviews in the CEOHP collection.

  • ALMSTRUM, V. L., APPLIN, E. G., OWENS, B. B., ADAMS, E., BARKER, L. J., IMPAGLIAZZO, J., JOSEPH, P. A., KAHLON, A., LAST, M. Z., LAWRENCE, A., AND YOUNG, A. 2008. Computing educators oral history project: seeking the trends. SIGCSE Bulletin inroads, 40(4). (Nov. 2008), 122-141. DOI: 10.1145/1473195.1473238

Qualitative analysis tools

Qualitative analysis tools such as Nvivo to annotate the interviews according to different criteria. The analysis to this point has considered the probing questions themselves, several emergent themes, and development of graphical pathways.

Analysis of the probing questions

Which questions occur where across the interviews? What is the context? Preliminary results are discussed in the 2008 Working Group report.

Emergent themes

Emergent themes is an inductive analysis that considers the interview content without directly tying the content to questions the interviewer had asked. Early results are discussed in the 2008 Working Group report.

Graphical pathways

This analysis approach used the modeling feature in NVivo to represent the pathways revealed in two interviews. This analysis began from a set of milestones likely to be part of a computing educator’s academic, professional, and personal pathway. We produced sample lifepath graphs for two of the interviews. The full discussion of these early explorations are included in in the 2008 Working Group report.


Clouds to analyze themes

We have used word clouds and tag clouds to represent key themes from individual interviews as well as the working group reports. A separate discusses clouds as an analysis approach. There is also a discussion of this approach in the 2008 Working Group report.