IRBWise & Exempt Review Determination 1
Describe the research design, including the proposed research methodology. For research directly involving human subjects, describe in chronological order the procedures that will occur. If subjects will be assigned to various conditions, describe how and why assignments will be made. (Examples of studies not directly involving human subjects, but still needing IRB approval, include prospective record reviews, observation of behavior without manipulation, and use of anonymized data).
The research design of this study will include three groups. One group will be students in the Fall 2021 Bucknell CSCI205 course and will consist of approximately 45 students. The second group will be students in the Spring 2022 Bucknell CSCI205 course and will consist of approximately 45 students. The third group of participants is the instructor team of the Bucknell CSCI205 course and includes the professor and the TAs and includes both the Fall and Spring sections. The total participants will be approximately 100 participants. In addition to direct participation from the students, data will be collected from the systems used by the students. This information is no more that what the students and instructors already have access to and is a de-identified, non-coded data set.
The Fall group will be asked about the tools currently used in the classroom. The Spring group will be asked about a new tool developed for use in the classroom.
Students and Instructors will be asked to complete three different surveys at various points of their final project (at the beginning, weekly and at the end. Surveys will be slightly different for the Spring versus Fall semesters. There is no recruiting for surveys as the participants are all students of the same course. Participation will be voluntarily and not required to complete the course. These surveys are only being conducted for research purposes. Extra credit will be provided for completion. Students who wish to earn the extra credit but not participate in the study may participate but opt out of having any data persisted for research purposes.
There are three different types of interviews. In the first two, students and instructors will asked to be interviewed at the completion of the final project. The student interviewees will be selected by asking for volunteers and/or selection by the instructor. This may introduce some bias, however, due to the small class size the analysis will be qualitative in nature. The instructor interviewees will be selected by asking for volunteers. Due to the small population (approximately 2 per semester), analysis will be qualitative in nature. The third interview is with the professor and will cover reviewing the new tool prototype during development.
The two tools used in the course relevant to this research for the Fall course include the university hosted GitLab and Agile-GitLabCE https://lilyheart.github.io/agile-gitlabce/. Both of these tools are the standard tools used as a part of this class and has been for the past several semesters. GitLab is similar to Georgia Tech's GitHub and is a platform used in CSCI205 to manage a programming project. Agile-GitLabCE is reporting tool that summarizes the information stored in GitLab. Students input information into GitLab data such as time spent working on a portion of their project into GitLab and Agile-GitLabCE produces a chart summarizing this data (burndown chart) and summarize the hours spent by all team members. Any team member can access this information at any time. In the Spring course the Agile-GitLabCE tool will be replaced with a new, to be developed tool. The new tool will act as an interface to GitLab. The tool will perform the same actions in GitLab via the GitLab API that the students would have with hopefully less frustrations. The data being collected is no more than what the students and instructors already have access to. The information will be summarized to points such as how frequently the students use the tools provided to them and how frequently they needed to make corrections in the system.
Dr. Brian King is the professor for the Bucknell CSCI205 course. His involvement beyond normal instruction of the course includes distributing survey and interview links. He will not have access to any raw research data other than what is normally accessible as a part of the course.
Bucknell University's involvement with the research is only through Dr. Brian King and his course, CSCI205.
State the duration of subject participation. How many hours, days, weeks or months? Specify number of sessions and, to the extent possible, state total amount of time for subject participation.
Surveys: Over an approximate four to five week period, students will complete 5 surveys that will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. At the end of the project each semester, students will be asked to complete a survey that will take approximately 30 minutes.
Interviews: The student and instructor end of project interviews will take approximately 1 hour and the prototype review interview will take approximate 1.5 hours.
Describe study assessments and other data collection methods. Upload all instruments, including rating scales, questionnaires, surveys, focus group and interview guides, and so on at the end of this online application in the ATTACH DOCUMENTS section. (NOTE: The IRB recognizes that such specificity may not be possible in ethnographic or anthropological studies. In such cases, provide sufficient detail for the board to understand the study methodology).
Three different types of data collection will be done; surveys, interviews and automatic data collection.