Précis of Feedback

Oral Defense Feedback

Overall, Minji Jeon did well in her oral defense and was clearly well prepared. She was confident, cogent, responsive to suggestions, and thoughtful in her remarks. Minji was adequately strong in research, teaching, and service. There were no major issues; nevertheless, due to the pandemic, we realize that the first author study was not what Minji had originally envisioned. The resulting study showed creativity and insight, despite the acknowledged limitations.

Electronic Dossier

We appreciate the time and effort put into the design dossier. It was well-designed, easily accessible, and information was presented appropriately. However, Minji could be more organized in terms of your teaching section. Revise your dossier based on the conditions listed below.

IST Content

Based on your dossier and presentation, you are moving in the right direction in terms of your knowledge of IST content.

Research

Research progress -- good engagement with research from participation on grant-funded studies with faculty, presentations, and pipeline of manuscripts. Active in securing funding for herself as well.

Teaching

Teaching is a strength; still, we want more insights into your views on teaching and learning. In a nutshell, what is your teaching philosophy? You will be asked for this in the future. We suggest that you also pay attention to the alignment between this teaching philosophy and your research.

Service

Your service work is good and varied. Service experiences are solid -- an excellent record and well-aligned with young academic interest areas and goals.

Oral Defense

Your presentation was delightful. You had prompt, accurate, specific, thoughtful, and highly cogent answers to reviewer questions. You also displayed great presence.

Conditions

🌕Revise the first-authored study

• Point to limitations. These should include (but not necessarily be limited to):

  • • Your own concerns about the instructional design in the study.

    • The sample size (which you have covered, but which should not be treated as the only concern).

    • Possible order effects in the design of the study.

    • Possible tool complexities and feature limitations.

• Enrich the literature review:

  • • Include the foundations of your sources for the knowledge building model you are using, and not referenced solely to Kwon, et. Al (e.g., Randy Garrison as well as Sanna Jarvela and Charlotte Gunawardena). For example, the Alsaif dissertation can be referenced on the other side as a current and relevant, though not identical use of the model.

    • Seek out and include more seminal works and foundations of the literature addressing the critiques/limits regarding visual tools in learning.

• Consider in the implications suggested by prior research which indicates that visual tools come with conceptual complexities, mainly because they are abstract and therefore their properties must be learned in order for them to be effective.

🌕Revise the Candidate's Statement/Dossier Statements

2. • Revise the candidate's statement to summarize your professional goals, make a brief overview of your research interests and plans for a future direction, and mention your general state of readiness for fully independent scholarship.

   • Create separate statements for teaching, research, and service to appear in each of these sections of the dossier. These will be based on/incorporate text from the current candidate's statement.

   • Teaching is a strength, but you need to add a couple of paragraphs about your teaching philosophy.

🌕CV

3. • This needs one-inch margins all around.

   • You should list your work experience before research experience.

   • Please add page numbers to the CV.

   • Submitted articles are not yet publications. You might change that wording.

   • And publications need categories and subheadings. Such as Journal Articles Submitted or In Revision, Journal Article Publication, Book Chapter Publications, Conference Proceedings, etc.

🌕 Explain clearly why you're interested in two divergent areas, CS education and CSCL

1. • Set priorities for area-specific and focused research agenda

   • Need to answer what interests me most in CS education?

   • Need to think about who you're going to be as a scholar moving forward

   • What parts of AI are interesting?

The themes such as AI education, block-based programming, graphic organizers in online discussion could be all integrated into one thread: efforts in making a difficult and abstract problem more concrete and meaningful.

I have been contemplating my research goals and my future career as an education researcher. As a result, I organized my thoughts into four main research goals: CS education with accessible representations made by technology, preparing teachers for CS education, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in CS education, and validating the effects of accessible representations in understanding complex concepts.

🌕 Revisions on the candidate statement

1. • What are the gaps between teaching practice and learning theories with regard to CS education?

   • Too broad introduction

   • Further development on Breadth and Depth with more elaborations on how minoring in statistics is connected to the studies in IST

   • Proofread the candidate statement

   • Make a candidate statement something that can be downloaded as a Word doc and send it to the committee seeking feedback.

I reflected the suggestions on my candidate statement which can be seen here.

🌕 Networking

1. • Get involved in the service opportunities for the communities of interest in conferences (e.g., communication assistant)

Following the advice, I presented the research findings at conferences like AECT, CSTA, and SIGCSE. I also participated in Buddy Program in 2021 SIGCSE TS, where I could connect with leading scholars and aspiring graduate students in the field of CS education. But, I think I still need more experience in academic networking, communication, and building collegiality with other scholars. I plan to participate in more in-person and virtual conferences to explore the communities of interest and contribute to the research community by sharing my studies.

🌕 Applying for a Master degree in IST: prepare a portfolio

I plan to apply for it next academic year (2022 Fall), and in order to do that, I need to create a web portfolio to fulfill the master's requirement.