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Creators/Authors contains: "Oleson, Alannah"

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  1. ObjectivesIn calls for excellent and equitable Computer Science (CS) education, the wordrigoroften appears, but it often goes undefined. The goal of this work is to understand how CS teachers, instructors, and students conceive of rigor. Research Questions:1) What do CS instructors think rigor is? and 2) What do students think rigor is? Methods:Using the principles of phenomenological research, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 10 post-secondary CS students, 10 secondary CS teachers, and 9 post-secondary CS instructors, to understand their conceptions of rigor. Results:Analysis showed that no participants had the same understanding of rigor. We found that participants had abstractPrinciples of Rigorwhich included: Precision, Systematic Thought Process, Depth of Understanding, and Challenge. They also had concreteObservations of Rigorthat included Time and Effort, Intrinsic Drive, Productive Failure, Struggle, Outcomes, and Gatekeeping. Participants also sharedConditions for Rigorwhich included Expectations, Standards, Community Support, and Resources. Implications:Our data supports prior work that educators are using different definitions of rigor. This implies that each educator holds different expectations for students, without necessarily communicating these expectations to their students. In the best case, this might confuse students; in the worst case, it reinforces hegemonic norms which can lead to gatekeeping which prevents students from fully participating in the CS field. Based on these insights, we argue that to commit to the idea of quality CS learning, the community must discard the use of this concept of rigor to justify student learning and re-imagine alternate benchmarks. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 11, 2026
  2. Technology should be accessible and inclusive, so designers should learn to consider the needs of different users. Toward this end, we created the theoretically-grounded CIDER assumption elicitation technique, an educational analytical design evaluation method to teach inclusive design skills. CIDER ( Critique , Imagine , Design , Expand , Repeat ) helps designers recognize and respond to bias using the critical lens of assumptions about users . Through an eleven-week mixed-method case study in an interaction design course with 40 undergraduate students and follow-up interviews, we found that activities based on the CIDER technique may have helped students identify increasingly many types of design bias over time and reflect on their unconscious biases about users. The activities also had lasting impacts, encouraging some students to adopt more inclusive approaches in subsequent design work. We discuss the implications of these findings, namely that educational techniques like CIDER can help designers learn to create equitable technology designs. 
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  3. As computing courses become larger, students of minoritized groups continue to disproportionately face challenges that hinder their academic and professional success (e.g. implicit bias, microaggressions, lack of resources, assumptions of preparatory privilege). This can impact career aspirations and sense of belonging in computing communities. Instructors have the power to make immediate changes to support more equitable learning, but they are often unaware of students' challenges. To help both instructors and students understand the inequities in their classes, we developed StudentAmp, an interactive system that uses student feedback and self-reported demographic information (e.g. gender, ethnicity, disability, educational background) to show challenges and how they affect students differently. To help instructors make sense of feedback, StudentAmp ranks challenges by student-perceived disruptiveness. We conducted formative evaluations with five large college computing courses (150 - 750 students) being taught remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that students shared challenges beyond the scope of the course, perceived sharing information about who they were as useful but potentially dangerous, and that teaching teams were able to use this information to consider the positionality of students sharing challenges. Our findings relate to a central design tension of supporting equity by sharing contextualized information about students while also ensuring their privacy and well-being. 
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  6. Inclusive design is important in today's software industry, but there is little research about how to teach it. In collaboration with 9 teacher-researchers across 8 U.S. universities and more than 400 computer and information science students, we embarked upon an Action Research investigation to gather insights into the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) that teachers need to teach a particular inclusive design method called GenderMag. Analysis of the teachers' observations and experiences, the materials they used, direct observations of students' behaviors, and multiple data on the students' own reflections on their learning revealed 11 components of inclusive design PCK. These include strategies for anticipating and addressing resistance to the topic of inclusion, strategies for modeling and scaffolding perspective taking, and strategies for tailoring instruction to students' prior beliefs and biases. 
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