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• 1. [Article] Effectiveness of end-user debugging software features : are there gender issues?

  Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and ...

  Citation × Citation Citation Abstract Copy Title: Effectiveness of end-user debugging software features : are there gender issues? Author: Cook, Curtis R., Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Sorte, Shraddha, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Hastings, Michelle, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals—but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in feature acceptance, and show that these differences can significantly impact effectiveness. Title: Effectiveness of end-user debugging software features : are there gender issues? Author: Cook, Curtis R., Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Sorte, Shraddha, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Hastings, Michelle, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals—but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in feature acceptance, and show that these differences can significantly impact effectiveness. Close

• 2. [Article] Gender : an important factor in end-user programming environments?

  A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring ...

  Citation × Citation Citation Abstract Copy Title: Gender : an important factor in end-user programming environments? Author: Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in decision making, learning, and problem solving. This paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for investigating this issue by surveying gender difference literature from five domains from the perspective of possible implications for end-user programming. We present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point for organized investigations into issues that may be important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness of end-user programmers. Title: Gender : an important factor in end-user programming environments? Author: Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in decision making, learning, and problem solving. This paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for investigating this issue by surveying gender difference literature from five domains from the perspective of possible implications for end-user programming. We present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point for organized investigations into issues that may be important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness of end-user programmers. Close

• 3. [Article] On to the real world : gender and self-efficacy in Excel

  Although there have been a number of studies of end-user software development tasks, few of them have considered gender issues for real end-user developers in real-world environments for end-user programming. In ...

  Citation × Citation Citation Abstract Copy Title: On to the real world : gender and self-efficacy in Excel Author: Inman, Derek, Rector, Kyle, Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science Although there have been a number of studies of end-user software development tasks, few of them have considered gender issues for real end-user developers in real-world environments for end-user programming. In order to be trusted, the results of such laboratory studies must always be re-evaluated with fewer controls, more closely reflecting real-world conditions. Therefore, the research question in this paper is whether the results of a Gender HCI controlled study generalize -- to real-world end-user developers, in a real-world spreadsheet environment, using a realworld spreadsheet. Our findings are that the concepts revealed by the original laboratory study appear to be quite robust, being demonstrated in multiple ways in this real-world environment. Title: On to the real world : gender and self-efficacy in Excel Author: Inman, Derek, Rector, Kyle, Beckwith, Laura A., Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science Although there have been a number of studies of end-user software development tasks, few of them have considered gender issues for real end-user developers in real-world environments for end-user programming. In order to be trusted, the results of such laboratory studies must always be re-evaluated with fewer controls, more closely reflecting real-world conditions. Therefore, the research question in this paper is whether the results of a Gender HCI controlled study generalize -- to real-world end-user developers, in a real-world spreadsheet environment, using a realworld spreadsheet. Our findings are that the concepts revealed by the original laboratory study appear to be quite robust, being demonstrated in multiple ways in this real-world environment. Close

• 4. [Article] Mining interpretable human strategies : a case study

  This paper focuses on mining the strategies of problem solving software users by observing their actions. Our application domain is an HCI study aimed at discovering general strategies employed by software ...

  Citation × Citation Citation Abstract Copy Title: Mining interpretable human strategies : a case study Author: Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Fern, Xiaoli, Komireddy, Chaitanya, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science This paper focuses on mining the strategies of problem solving software users by observing their actions. Our application domain is an HCI study aimed at discovering general strategies employed by software users and understanding how such strategies relate to gender and success. We cast this problem as a sequential pattern discovery problem, where user strategies are manifested as sequential patterns. Problematically, we found that the patterns discovered by standard algorithms were difficult to interpret and provided limited information about high-level strategies. To help interpret the patterns and extract general strategies, we examined multiple ways of clustering the patterns into meaningful groups, which collectively led to interesting findings about user behavior both in terms of gender differences and problem-solving success. As a real-world application of data mining techniques, our work led to the discovery of new strategic patterns that are highly correlated with user success and had not been revealed in more than nine years of manual empirical work. As a case study, our work also highlights important research directions for making data mining more assessible to non-experts and easier to apply. Title: Mining interpretable human strategies : a case study Author: Burnett, Margaret, 1949-, Fern, Xiaoli, Komireddy, Chaitanya, Oregon State University. Dept. of Computer Science This paper focuses on mining the strategies of problem solving software users by observing their actions. Our application domain is an HCI study aimed at discovering general strategies employed by software users and understanding how such strategies relate to gender and success. We cast this problem as a sequential pattern discovery problem, where user strategies are manifested as sequential patterns. Problematically, we found that the patterns discovered by standard algorithms were difficult to interpret and provided limited information about high-level strategies. To help interpret the patterns and extract general strategies, we examined multiple ways of clustering the patterns into meaningful groups, which collectively led to interesting findings about user behavior both in terms of gender differences and problem-solving success. As a real-world application of data mining techniques, our work led to the discovery of new strategic patterns that are highly correlated with user success and had not been revealed in more than nine years of manual empirical work. As a case study, our work also highlights important research directions for making data mining more assessible to non-experts and easier to apply. Close