Winter Student Research Internship: Co‑designing Teamwork Feedback for Computing Education

Primary supervisor

Ee Hui Lim

This is a Winter Student Research Internship. Please apply here: https://www.monash.edu/study/fees-scholarships/scholarships/summer-winter  

Team‑based projects are widely used across computing education to support the development of technical competence alongside collaboration and professional skills. While students engage extensively in teamwork during these projects, educators often face challenges in seeing and responding to teamwork processes as they unfold, which can constrain opportunities to provide timely, process‑focused feedback beyond final project outcomes.

This project focuses on Pulse, a teamwork platform used in our teaching context to capture routine information about team processes, such as check‑ins, reflections, peer input, and related collaboration activity. Pulse is used to support formative feedback on teamwork during project work, rather than to evaluate final performance.

The project will conduct a small‑scale pilot study that uses co‑design with students and teachers to explore how teamwork feedback features might be better aligned with computing education practices. Rather than treating co‑design as product development, the project treats co‑design activities as a source of empirical insight into how students and educators want teamwork processes to be represented, interpreted, and acted upon in computing courses.

This aligns with existing computing education research highlighting the challenges of teamwork assessment and feedback, as well as learning analytics research that emphasises involving end users in the design of educational tools to improve interpretability, uptake, and trust.

 

Aim/outline

The primary aim of the project is to understand how co‑design with students and teachers can inform the design of teamwork feedback in computing education.

Specifically, the project seeks to:

  1. Elicit student and teacher perspectives on what types of teamwork information are meaningful during computing projects.
  2. Use co‑design activities to explore alternative ways of representing teamwork processes for feedback purposes.
  3. Examine how these co‑designed representations align with student experiences of teamwork and feedback during projects.
  4. Derive design insights relevant to teamwork feedback and learning analytics tools in computing education contexts.

URLs/references

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Petre, M. (2015). Team projects in computing education. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1145/2808079

Borrego, M., Karlin, J., McNair, L. D., & Beddoes, K. (2013). Team effectiveness theory from industrial and organizational psychology applied to engineering student project teams. Journal of Engineering Education, 102(4), 472–512. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20023

Ahn, J., Campos, F., Nguyen, H., Hays, M., & Morrison, J. (2021). Co‑designing for privacy, transparency, and trust in learning analytics. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. https://doi.org/10.1145/3448139.3448145

Sarmiento, J. P., Wise, A. F., Perera, N., et al. (2022). Participatory and co‑design of learning analytics: An initial review. In Proceedings of LAK 22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3506860.3506910

Martínez‑Maldonado, R., et al. (2022). CADA: A teacher‑facing learning analytics dashboard to foster teachers’ awareness. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 8885–8912. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758‑022‑09598‑7

Required knowledge

Interest in computing education, HCI, or learning analytics. Familiarity with teamwork in computing projects. Basic understanding of qualitative methods or user-centred design desirable. Strong communication and organisation skills required.