UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shomir Wilson, associate professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), received a Best Paper Award at the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), held Feb. 18–21 in St. Louis.
“SIGCSE is the largest and most widely recognized conference for computing education, bringing together researchers and educators from around the world, ” said Wilson. “It’s a community that I’ve wanted to know better, and the paper enabled that.”
Wilson presented at the conference and received the Best Paper Award for Position and Curricula Initiatives, which recognizes a top paper that either makes a strong argument about an issue in computing education or presents a significant curriculum or program innovation.
In “Rethinking How We Discuss the Guidance of Student Researchers in Computing,” Wilson observes that, in the context of student research, concepts like “adviser” and “mentor” often lack clear meaning.
“These concepts are sometimes narrowly defined, sometimes used interchangeably or sometimes used to include (or exclude) many interrelated activities,” Wilson said. “This ambiguity gets in the way of understanding faculty obligations, and it can create harms by hiding conflicts of interest.”
Wilson used a facet framework and a literature review to identify six roles faculty play in guiding student researchers: adviser, mentor, manager, collaborator, coach and sponsor. He proposed “guidance” as an umbrella term for these roles and showed that no single role fully supports students and that tensions can arise among them.
“Although I published this paper in a computing conference, I hope it is useful beyond that scope,” Wilson said. “I think the ideas can be broadly relevant to university faculty who work with student researchers at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.”
Wilson — who serves as coordinator of the information technology ethics and compliance bachelor’s degree program in IST’s Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics — said he originally intended to share these ideas as part of his advice series, which he created to help students, new faculty and others understand “typically unwritten” customs and procedures in academia.
“This was a single-author manuscript based on an idea that I originally planned for an advice page on my website, but instead I decided to try for a publication,” he said. “I didn't know how it would be received. I'm glad I took the chance.”
Wilson also had a poster at SIGCSE, “The Hidden Curriculum of Faculty Careers in Computing.” The poster referenced the “Academia as a Career” section of his advice pages.