Resources
From NW-DCSD
Contents |
Other Interesting Curriculum
Game-Themed Introductory Programming Project
Virtual Reading Groups
Master Survey
The Master Survey contains a set of questions to be asked before and after a module is deployed in the classroom. Module developers should use the Master Survey as a template, selecting a subset of the questions (perhaps with minor modifications) that are relevant for their particular curriculum. The overall goal is for all individual surveys to contain questions that come from a common source so we can look at student responses both at the individual (module) level, across a set of modules that share some common trait, or across all modules for the NWDCSD project.
IRB Documents
The project has been reviewed by WSU's Institutional Review Board (IRB) and has been determined to qualify for "Exempt" status. "Exemption" does not mean that you can ignore the IRB completely; it just means that the project poses no serious risks to participants and thus need not be reviewed by the full Board.
If you are contributing to the project and plan to issue a survey to your students, you will need approval from your own institution's IRB before you begin. Note that the IRB will not give post-hoc approval, so any data collected before your IRB approves your protocol cannot ever be used in any research publication. An IRB review will require a fair amount of paper work and it may take a couple of weeks to get their response, so be sure to start early.
In many cases, on a cross-institutional project such as this one, the IRB review is performed at one institution (WSU, in this case) and other schools simply go along with their conclusion. However, some schools require their own assessment. To start with, you should try sending a brief letter to your institute's IRB describing the project and the fact that it qualified for "Exempt" status at WSU, and ask if you can follow the WSU protocol without additional review at your institution. Below are some documents that may help you out.
Note that relatively minor changes in the research protocol may require resubmitting the project to the IRB. The two that are most likely to affect us are (a) changes to the survey questions and (b) including minors in the study. Be sure to ask your IRB explicitly whether you need to resubmit if you change the wording or content of the survey questions. Research involving minors generally will not qualify for "Exempt" status. Also, some IRBs require resubmitting the project every year for ongoing research.
