Computational Literacies Lab

Literature Review

Drawing on course readings and additional literature, frame a learning goal relevant to K-12 CS or interdisciplinary applications of computing. Your review should locate the learning goal in relation to Kafai, Proctor, and Lui's {{< pr kafai_2019_theory_dialogue >}} cognitive/situated/critical framework, and possibly other frameworks such as diSessa's {{< pr disessa_2001_changing >}} account of computational literacy, Vakil's {{< pr vakil_2018_ethics >}} justice-oriented CS education, and/or frameworks from other disciplines. Your literature review should explain why this learning goal is important and summarize prior related work.

Format

Your literature review should consist of a 500-word synthesis and 10-20 references, each annotated with a few sentences summarizing how the reference could be useuful to you. The synthesis should answer the following questions:

  • How are you framing "learning"?
  • How have prior projects tried to support this framing of learning?

Please submit one literature review per group by email to chrisp@buffalo.edu. Assignments are due by midnight the day before class--in this case, by Monday, February 15.

Assessment Criteria

You will receive individualized feedback and a holistic grade for this assignment, based on the following criteria:

  • Coherence: Does the review articulate a framing of learning which would allow you to ground research questions or design goals?
  • Specificity: Does the review make effective use of the references selected? Are claims supported by references?

Tips

  • [Here's my example]({{< ref "model.md" >}}).
  • You are not expected to magically know a new field of literature, or even to know how to find your way in. If you're exploring a field which is new to you, you are strongly advised to plan a meeting with Dr. Proctor, or someone with relevant expertise who can suggest where to start.
  • If you are new to literature reviews, this would be an excellent time to invest in tools that will make you more effective throughout grad school. Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager which you can use to store your downloaded papers, add notes, generate pre-formatted bibliographies, and sync across devices.
  • Academic search engines like Google Scholar are a great place to start. One strategy for finding the central work of a field is to find highly-cited papers and then search within articles that cite them.
  • Skim, don't read! Your goal in a preliminary literature review is to find out what's out there.