Steve Draper and Joseph Maguire on the Different Types of Contributions to Knowledge

Science is a broad church, full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less. That’s according to biologist Steve Jones, but in Computing Education Research (CER) are we being too narrow-minded about what counts (and what doesn’t count) as a contribution? We spoke to Steve Draper and Joseph Maguire at the University of Glasgow about their paper The different types of contributions to knowledge (in CER): All needed, but not all recognised published in the ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE).

The overall aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion about the activities within CER, and to develop a more thoughtful and explicit perspective on the different types of research activity within CER, and their relationships with each other. While theories may be the most valuable outputs of research to those wishing to apply them, for researchers themselves there are other kinds of contribution important to progress in the field. This is what relates it to the immediate subject of this special journal issue on theory in CER. We adopt as our criterion for value “contribution to knowledge”. This paper’s main contributions are: A set of 12 categories of contribution which together indicate the extent of this terrain of contributions to research. Leading into that is a collection of ideas and misconceptions which are drawn on in defining and motivating “ground rules”, which are hints and guidance on the need for various often neglected categories. These are also helpful in justifying some additional categories which make the set as a whole more useful in combination. These are followed by some suggested uses for the categories, and a discussion assessing how the success of the paper might be judged.

A full transcript and show notes can be found at uki-sigcse.acm.org/2025/09/08/episode-4