Introduction to Studiocode

Long time no post! For those of you who haven’t heard, my husband and I recently moved out of New York State to Normal, Illinois for my new job as an assistant professor in the special education department at Illinois State University.  Now that the semester is off and running and we are settling into our new home, I am ready to start up with this blog again.

I am starting a new research project at ISU with special education teacher candidates in a math methods course.  Since I have to introduce my research team to Studiocode, I thought I would make an “Introduction to Studiocode” video that might benefit other users as well.  If you are a user of Studiocode and you need to introduce others to the software, this 9 minute video might be something good to share with them.  If you are not a user of Studiocode, this video should introduce you to its basic functionality.  This is not a tutorial, but rather a quick presentation of what the software can do.  Remember, this video only represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of capabilities, but it’s a great place to start for someone who is completely unfamiliar with this software.

Point by Point IRR Considerations

NOTE:  This post is a follow up to my posts on calculating Point by Point Inter Rater Reliability (if you are not familiar with my scripting method for this, go back and watch that video first).

I recently received an email from a Studiocode user asking a great question about those instances where neither rater coded any instances of a particular code.  Using the scripts I originally provided, the output would say “IRR = 0%” if neither rater coded anything.  This is an inaccurate representation because, in actuality, both raters were in 100% agreement that there were no instances of that code.  In order to remedy this, we need to add a conditional IF statement into our output.  I explain how to do this in the following video.  Also note some of the considerations I raise at the end of the video regarding your interpretation of 100% IRR when there are no instances vs. 100% IRR when ther are coded instances.

Theory Building Part 2 – Instance Adjustments & Basic Scripting

In this second part to my theory building posts, I show what a “first pass” might look like in your theory building approach to video coding.  I demonstrate 3 different ways to adjust instances after you do your first pass (all of which are useful depending on how specific you need to be with your durations) as well as how to write some simple scripts to display valuable information to guide the next step of your theory building process.

Useful Features for Theory Building Research Approaches – Part 1

It has been a very long time since my last post, mainly because I have been job hunting and finishing up my dissertation (both of which have been a success…yay!).  I also started a new project with Studiocode Group called Tell Your Studiocode Story for which I will be interviewing active users so they can share their wisdom about using Studiocode (iCoda, etc.) for research and practice with other users or potential users.  I really think this project will help the community to collaborate.  If you want to see the first interview (with me as the participant), you can find the link under the Tell Your Studiocode Story tab.  We are just getting up and running, so the materials are on a temporary blog page.  As soon as we get our permanent site set up, I will keep everyone posted about how to access the content.

This next blog post (or series of posts really) was inspired by my interview and some recent emails I received about using Studiocode for transcriptions and more qualitative theory-building approaches to research.  In this first post, I demonstrate an easy and practical way to use Studiocode for transcribing discourse.  The features I use include exclusive links, notes, and the transcription window.  I also remind users of how to adjust the lengths of instances right from the timeline.

Graphs in the Code Window for Data Visualization

Looking at a grid of timer outputs in the code window is not generally the fastest way to digest the massive amounts of information you collect from video data.  For this reason, I decided to make graphs to display this information.  Scripting allows you to make buttons that change color based on calculated values, so bar graphs are fairly easy to generate.

For anyone who will be at Texas Christian University for the Studiocode conference next week, I will be presenting on data visualization in the code window and will recap all the different ways I have used scripting to create clear representations of my data.  Come with ideas for your own research and we will brainstorm the best ways to visualize your data as well!

More Alternate Names

Here is the next stage of my Independence code window.  Something I did not mention before was that in addition to following the teacher around the classroom to calculate student independence, I will also need to follow around the Teaching Assistant and myself (the researcher).  All three of us were in the room during independent math practice and could have assisted the students.  In this screencast I show you how I used alternate names to add this component and how I added some output scripting to display some key information about student independence.

Restructuring Independence Text Labels

At the end of my last post I mentioned it wasn’t ideal to have a duplicate seating chart version of my alternate names text labels.  In this screencast I demonstrate how to layer these text labels with invisible borders and fills so I do not need to duplicate the seating chart.  I also show how to visually test to see whether your activation links are correct, especially when you have made adjustments to the code window after having a lot of linking.  Now the code window looks much neater and I will have room to add some data visualization graphs.

Building the New Independence Code Window

I’m finally back from all of my January traveling and I am really excited about getting back to coding my research.  In this screencast I will give you a quick recap of my last post and then show you how I have added some scripting to calculate how much time the teacher spends with individual students as well as students by subgroup and by intervention condition.

A New Spin on my Independence Code Window

For my dissertation, I have 19 participating students using iPads during independent math practice. With only one camera recording the entire room I had to find a new way to measure how independently the students were working.  In this video I show you the first phase of the new creative code window I came up with.

Changing Timelines After Changing Code Windows: Code Row Colors

I got a great question in an email and I wanted to address it on my blog.  As we make changes to our code windows, we will find that we have already coded videos with timelines that now need to be updated.  While you can use a simple ‘Find/Replace’ command to change the text of the code and label names, what do you do to change the colors of the rows if you change button colors?  In this video I show you how to quickly change row colors in the timeline.  If someone else has a faster solution that does not involve changing the colors row by row, please let me know 🙂