The TIDESS team has been coding the audio data from our spring lab study using the codebook we developed. Each transcript was fully coded by two students on the research team and, to investigate inter-rater reliability, 10% of each transcript was coded by our co-principal investigators. As is standard in qualitative research, we have had several team meetings to help us get on the same page about each code and their definitions as coding progresses.

Currently, we are coding participant’s utterances, that is, what they say. In our study, we had asked participants to use the “think aloud” procedure. This means that as participants interacted with the prototype, they verbalized their thought process. Our participants spoke a lot during the session, so we have a lot of utterances to code as a team. It has been very exciting to code the transcripts. Developing the codebook was a lengthy process, but the codes we have created seem to really encompass what happened during each session. We have also created an “other” code which we are using whenever a code does not seem to fully apply to a certain utterance. We will analyze these “other” utterances, along with our other codes, to see if there are any trends in these “other” codes for unanticipated behaviors.
As I have coded, I have noticed a lot of excitement from our participants as they interacted with the prototype. Participants seemed very interested in exploring and learning from the prototype which is something we aimed for in the design. Participants also seemed to collaborate a lot to try and complete the tasks. We have done our initial analysis where we dug into if and how participants were able to learn from our prototype, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see users so excited to interact with something our team built.

This is my junior year as a computer science student, and Fall is my third semester in the lab. Working on the TIDESS project has taught me a lot about the broad impact technology can make on learning. I am excited to continue on this project in the fall, and can’t wait to see what our findings are.

by Alice Darrow

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