Best Paper Award to Joey Reyes, Undergraduate Intern

We’re pleased to recently learn that Joey Reyes and Monica McGill (advisor) received the best paper award at the 2023 ASEE IL-IN Section Conference held at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville on April 1, 2023.

Joey, an undergraduate student at Knox College, presented their paper Feasibility of Using the CAPE Framework to Identify Gaps in Equity-focused CS Education Research. This paper describe a pilot test Joey and Monica conducted to determine the feasibility of using the CAPE theoretical framework to identify coverage of equity-focused CSER. The Capacity, Access, Participation and Experience (CAPE) framework developed by Fletcher and Warner examines the capacity to offer CS education, learner access to CS education, learner participation in CS education (enrollment) and experiences learners have when learning CS.

They started with one primary research question: How feasible is it to use the CAPE framework for identify coverage gaps in K-12 CS education research?

Then they created a secondary research question for narrowing down the set of articles examined and testing its feasibility: What are the gaps in research focused on K-12 CS education in which girls are participants in the studies?

They chose to use the Resource Center’s set of 800+ articles and examined studies in which only girls were participants (n=51), then examined each of the 51 articles to determine which key CAPE component(s) each covers. The pilot results showed that CSER among girls covers areas related to Experience (92%) and Capacity (59%), but little to no coverage in the areas of Access (0%) and Participation (2%) of girls. Within experience, coverage in some areas was much higher than others, indicating potential gaps in research.

To answer the primary research question and determine the feasibility of using CAPE for analyzing the entire corpus of 800+ articles, they evaluated feasibility across two key areas, implementation and practicality, and found both to be satisfactory.