Work in Progress WorkshopICER 2026

The WIP Workshop, formerly named the Critical Research Review, is a dedicated one-day, in-person workshop for ICER attendees who hold terminal degrees or are established computing education researchers to provide and receive friendly, constructive feedback on work-in-progress. To apply for the workshop, you will specify a topic about which you would like to request feedback. WIP participants will be assigned to thematic groups with 4–6 participants.

The WIP Workshop is intended to operate as a focused, developmental mini-retreat for academics, postdoctoral researchers, research fellows, and other post-PhD professionals engaged in computing education scholarship. The purpose is to create a supportive space in which participants can share work that is still forming, receive constructive feedback, and help one another move their projects forward. The value of the workshop depends on active preparation and engagement from all participants: everyone will get more out of the session when everyone puts more into it. The WIP co-chairs will facilitate the workshop and support productive discussion, but the quality of the retreat depends on participants arriving ready to contribute thoughtfully to one another’s work.

WIP is a great way to make progress on some tricky piece of work or thinking, around which discussion with peers always helps. In turn, your reflections and observations on others’ work will really help them and, no doubt, take your own thinking forward in unexpected ways too.

Hence, WIP will be the right experience for you if you would like to provide and receive constructive advice, support, feedback, or critique on computing education research issues such as:

• A kernel of a research idea
• A grant proposal
• A rejected ICER paper
• A study design
• A qualitative analysis approach
• A quantitative analysis approach
• A motivation for a research project
• A theoretical framing
• A challenge in a research project

The goal of the workshop is to provide a space where we can receive and provide support.

The workshop is intended for active CS education researchers who are not pursuing a degree. PhD students are encouraged to apply for the Doctoral Consortium, held on the same day as WIP.

Timeline

• Friday, June 19th, 2026 AoE: Application deadline.
• Friday, June 26th, 2026 AoE: Notification of acceptance by the WIP co-chairs.
• Thursday, July 23rd, 2026 AoE: Participants submit their initial 2–4 page white papers / primers to the other WIP participants.
• Friday, July 24th, 2026: Participants begin reading all other white papers / primers.
• Friday, July 31st, 2026 AoE: Participants provide written feedback on the other white papers / primers.
• Friday, August 7th, 2026 AoE: Participants submit an updated white paper / primer, reflecting on feedback received and clarifying what they want to follow up during the WIP session.
• Monday, August 10th, 2026: Informal dinner with other WIP participants, location TBD.
• Tuesday, August 11th, 2026: WIP session, concluding before the opening reception.

Call For Contributions

Application

To apply to participate in the WIP Workshop, please submit a 1–2 page overview of the work you will present to the group. Please also include a brief description of your previous research and areas of expertise you would offer the group. While no specific format is required, your submission should include:

• Your current professional affiliation and title
• Title
• Description of the work, usually 1–3 paragraphs
• Stage of the work when the WIP will occur, for example conceptual, new, ongoing, or near complete
• Type of feedback you would most like from WIP participants, for example possible research questions, design, critique, related work, fit with publication venues, or other issues
• Your research experience, for example qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods; study design; human subjects research; K-12, undergraduate, graduate, or professional contexts

Submit your application to the HotCRP instance: https://icer2026wip.hotcrp.com/

WIP Workshop

Accepted participants will then be required to prepare and submit a white paper / primer (2-4 pages) to serve as a primer for all workshop participants. White papers are not published in the conference proceedings.

The primer is intended as an instrument to help accepted participants sharpen their thinking before the workshop. It should help participants clarify the current state of their work, identify the challenges they are facing, and articulate what they most want to get out of the session. It also helps other participants arrive with enough shared understanding of the work to offer meaningful feedback. In this way, the primer reduces the amount of time needed during the workshop to explain the basic context of each project, allowing more of the session itself to focus on how the work might progress.

The primer can take any structure or form that the participant feels is appropriate, but it must be:

• Explicit about the goals and challenges of the work-in-progress.
• Clear about any additional material that will be presented to WIP participants.
• Thoughtful about the help being sought, by including two to four questions that stimulate discussion and guide feedback.

All accepted participants are expected to read the primers from the other workshop participants in advance. Feedback on the primers can take any form participants find useful, and may be as brief or as detailed as they wish. The purpose of this feedback is not to provide a formal review, but to help participants identify connections with their own work, draw on their experience, and offer advice or guidance that may help others make progress.

This advance preparation means that, when participants come together on the day itself, the discussion can move more quickly beyond orientation and explanation. Rather than spending too much of the workshop getting everyone on board with what the work is, participants can use the time to think collectively about next steps, possible directions, unresolved challenges, and practical ways to move the work forward.

Participants will then have an opportunity to update their own primer to reflect the feedback received and to clarify what they would most like to follow up during their WIP session.

At the workshop, depending upon group size, each participant will have time to provide context, elicit advice, support, feedback, and critique. Typically, one of the other group members acts as a notetaker during an individual’s time in order to allow the presenter to engage fully in the discussion.

WIP Workshop Chairs

Joseph Maguire, University of Glasgow, joseph.maguire@glasgow.ac.uk
Sue Sentance, University of Cambridge, ss2600@cam.ac.uk