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With our interest to improve our education in computer science, an understanding of how students learn about CS concepts, how different concepts are understood, as well as the conditions for learning, become important issues. A better understanding of our students and their learning gives us a strong tool in our efforts to develop teaching. There is an increasing awareness of the usefulness of theoretically sound research approaches: it opens for generalisations of results, it invites comparison between researchers, methods and results, and at the same time it makes the limits of the research visible. As examples on initiatives that have lately been taken to promote a conscious use of relevant research approaches, can be mentioned the bootstrapping project [13], the special issue on import and export of Computer Science Education (to appear), as well as papers offering overviews of the current use of certain approaches ([4], [8]) and attempts to verbalize models for a successful research process ([5], [6], [12]).These initiatives do not advocate the primacy of a certain approach over others. This openness is well-grounded, since "a particular approach offers certain perspectives on a research question, and, in this way, enables the researcher to study [these] aspects of learning, while other aspects, that are not in focus using the selected approach, become unclear or 'blurred' (Berglund, submitted for review). Thus, the selection an approach is closely intertwined with the research question under investigation.In this panel, the theoretical foundations for four different research approaches will be described, and examples of research performed within each of these approaches will be given. The examples will serve to illuminate which kinds of results that can be offered by a particular approach, and thereby illustrate its use.

We now and then make changes to our courses and how we teach or examine them. This is often done in isolation from other courses that the students take. In this paper we report on experiences made in a coordinated study concerning examination methods. The target group was 60 students from the Systems branch of the Engineering Physics study program. We changed all three courses they took during the first ten weeks of the spring semester 1996. The changes were in short: replace the final exam by weekly assignments, introduce seminars as a method of examination, and in the cases where a written exam was kept, the main focus of the questions were changed to showing understanding, ability to analyze and synthesize.Our experiences in this study clearly show that changing examination is a tool for changing the way our students work, and thus for improving the quality of the education.