David DeLiema, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology’s psychological foundations of education program, has been named a 2020 National Academy of Education/Spencer (NAEd/Spencer) Postdoctoral Fellow.

The award will fund DeLiema’s work, “Longitudinal Research on Collaborative Approaches to Failure in Youth Computer Science Workshops,” to investigate how learning communities support students when they encounter failure in the learning process. Focused on computer programming—a discipline in which debugging broken code is essential, extremely common, often challenging, and shaped by numerous tools—this study will address how debugging teaching and learning take place in moment-to-moment interactions between talk, action, gesture, and materials in case studies that stretch over several years. This work takes place in a learning community designed to nuance, distribute, and valorize the process of storytelling about failure to break down oversimplified accounts. The analysis aims to document how pedagogy foregrounds, backgrounds, and blends multiple valuable facets of failure: fixing bugs, avoiding past bugs, handling new bugs, engaging with authority, and calibrating confidence.

According to NAEd, DeLiema was selected for the award for his “potential contribution to the knowledge, understanding, and improvement of education.” One of only 30 researchers across the country to receive the award, DeLiema will be granted $70,000 to provide release time from teaching and administrative duties and funding for his research.

DeLiema’s research focuses on how students and teachers collaboratively navigate moments of failure when learning computer science, mathematics, and science. Learn more about his work.