This working group is conducting a scoping review exploring how interpretivist research paradigms are articulated, applied, and represented in qualitative research in computer science education. Despite the prevalence of qualitative research in our field slowly growing, interpretivist assumptions remain inconsistently described and understood; the direction of influence between this inconsistency and enduring debates over which paradigms are endorsed in our field remains unclear.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in education introduced powerful tools such as ChatGPT, which students increasingly use for academic purposes. However, these technologies present significant challenges for higher education, such as the risk of undermining academic integrity through AI-assisted performance and the uncertainty around proper use. This paper seeks to understand the benefits and risks university students perceive regarding LLM usage and how those influence their acceptance and use of related services in higher education. To this end, we employed a mixed-method approach. Using the UTAUT2 model extended by a Risk Expectancy construct, we conducted an online survey and follow-up interviews with university students. The results indicated that while students perceive considerable risks related to LLMs, those do not impact their usage and behavioral intention. We discuss this phenomenon based on the qualitative interview analysis and suggest research directions for future work.

K-12 computing education research is a rapidly growing field of research, both driven by and driving the implementation of computing as a school and extra-curricular subject globally. Within discipline-based education research, it is a new and emerging field, drawing on fields such as mathematics and science education research for inspiration and theoretical bases. The urgency around investigating effective teaching and learning in computing in school alongside broadening participation has led to much of the field being focused on empirical research. Less attention has been paid to the underlying philosophical assumptions informing the discipline, which might include a critical examination of the rationale for K-12 computing education, its goals and perspectives, and associated inherent values and beliefs. The goals of this research project are to understand the implicit and hidden values, perspectives and goals underpinning computing education at school. This will be achieved through a critical examination of a wide body of literature leading to the development of a categorization and framework.

Enabling students to recognize and evaluate the ubiquitous impact of computing technology on society is an internationally proclaimed goal of a K-12 computing education. To that end, students need to actually engage with their computing knowledge in concrete everyday situations. From the perspectives of learning transfer and variation theory, we conducted three iterations of a classroom intervention and qualitatively analyzed students’ learning processes. As a result, we propose a model of four so-called critical aspects of everyday computing technology in that context. We present various classroom situations and learning experiences in relation to those aspects, and discuss what seems to have enabled or prevented meaningful learning. In particular, we found that several students had difficulties in conceiving of computing technology as simultaneously economical and powerful, thus limiting its potential ubiquity. We discuss our findings in the context of contemporary theories of learning transfer and argue that they suggest specific issues that may seriously inhibit students to appropriately engage with their computing knowledge in the context of everyday technologies.

In order to understand and evaluate computing technology in their environment, students first need to be able to identify it. This task becomes increasingly difficult, however, as computing systems become more and more ubiquitous and invisible. Based on the analysis of semi-structured focus interviews with 28 German pre-college students, we present a grounded theory of their conceptions and reasoning related to the identification of computing within technical devices. At its core is the finding that many students seemed to differentiate technical artifacts with respect to three conceived levels of capability. Many household appliances, for instance, were very well seen as electronic and programmed, but still as too limited in their capability to warrant the presence of a “real” computer or to be related to informatics. Given the increasing versatility, power, and associated risks of modern embedded systems as well as the advent of the internet of things, this issue should clearly be addressed. Based on our grounded theory, we propose some first ideas for how this might be done.