Live data from Hacker News

What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

medium.com

71–72 of 72 posts

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#71
post #68

With all due respect for the Author (and I don't doubt in any way that his results are correct) I am surprised that a research with 26 participants can lead to anything , even if the Author himself specifies that in the "Limitations" of the paper: >Our research focused on a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country. Other students may have had different experiences, especially in ot…

I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn’t know before starting grad school, so I thought I’d write briefly. As a qualitative research project, the goal was not to find out how many students have which outcomes or experience. The goal was to find a range of experiences and how those experiences are viewed by students. For a qualitative project, 26 is actually a large sample and I intentionall…

>I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints.

I am not in anyway contending that, all I was noting was that your demostration (of what I would have assumed to be self-evident "there exist several groups and different viewpoints") is backed by so little data (and as written on the paper "a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country") that the title "What I Learned From Researching Coding Bootcamps", swiftly followed by a graph with "big numbers" such as "Graduation rates of coding bootcamps compared to Computer and Information Science degrees in the US. " seemed to me like a "quantitative" study. And notes like "Also, we noticed that at least four students happened to be married to programmers, and at least seven others had parents, siblings or other important people in their social circle who were programmers." do seem like a statistical approach.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#72
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn’t know before starting grad school, so I thought I’d write briefly. As a qualitative research project, the goal was not to find out how many students have which outcomes or experience. The goal was to find a range of experiences and how those experiences are viewed by students. For a qualitative project, 26 is actually a large sample and I intentionall…

>I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. I am not in anyway contending that, all I was noting was that your demostration (of what I would have assumed to be self-evident "there exist several groups and different viewpoints") is backed by so little data (and as written on the paper "a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country") that the titl…

I definitely see how the graph with numbers at the top and numbers mentioned inside the paper could be misleading. I hope I made it clear enough in the post and paper what the limitations are that people don't misinterpret my findings even if they may be disappointing in my methods and their limits.
Post reply on HN