ICER 2025 - Research Papers

Call for Papers
Submission Instructions

Call for Papers

Aims and Scope

The 21st annual ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER) aims to gather high-quality contributions to the Computing Education Research discipline. The “Research Papers” track invites submissions describing original research results related to any aspect of teaching and learning computing, from introductory through advanced material. Submissions are welcome from across the research methods used in Computing Education Research and related fields. Each contribution will be assessed based on:

the appropriateness and soundness of its methods
its relevance to teaching or learning computing, and
the depth of its contribution to the community’s understanding of the question at hand.

Research areas of particular interest include:

design-based research, learner-centered design, and evaluation of educational technology supporting computing knowledge or skills development,
discipline based education research (DBER) about computing, computer science, and related disciplines,
informal learning experiences related to programming and software development (all ages), ranging from after-school programs for children, to end-user development communities, to workplace training of computing professionals,
learnability of programming languages and tools for learning programming and computing concepts,
learning analytics and educational data mining in computing education contexts,
learning sciences work in the computing content domain,
measurement instrument development and validation (e.g., concept inventories, attitudes scales, etc) for use in computing disciplines,
pedagogical environments fostering computational thinking,
psychology of programming,
rigorous replication of empirical work, relevant to computing education, to compare with or extend previous empirical research results,
professional development for computing educators at all levels.

While this above list is non-exclusive, authors are also invited to consider the call for papers for the “Lightning Talks & Posters” and “Work-in-Progress” tracks if in doubt about the suitability of their work for this track.

Submission instructions will be made available soon.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

All questions about this call should go to the ICER 2025 program committee chairs at pc-chairs@icer.acm.org.

Important Dates

All submission deadlines are “anywhere on Earth” (AoE, UTC-12).

What	When
Titles, abstracts, and authors due. (The chairs will use this information to assign papers to PC members.)	Friday, March 14th, 2025
Full paper submission deadline	Friday, March 21st, 2025
Decisions announced	Thursday, May 15th, 2025
“Conditional Accept” revisions due	Thursday, May 29th, 2025
“Conditional Accept” revisions approval notification	Thursday, June 5th, 2025
Final versions due to TAPS	Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
ICER 2025 Conference	Sunday, August 3rd through Wednesday, August 6th 2025
Published in the ACM Digital Library	The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date will be the first day of the conference. The official publication date may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission Process

Submit at the ICER 2025 HotCRP site.

When you submit the abstract or full version ready for review, you need to perform the following actions:

Check the checkbox “ready for review” at the bottom of the submission form. (Otherwise it will be marked as a draft).
Check the checkbox “I have read and understood the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects”. Note: “Where such research is conducted in countries where no such local governing laws and regulations related to human participant and subject research exist, Authors must at a bare minimum be prepared to show compliance with the above detailed principles.”
Select the appropriate option under “Research Involving human participants / subjects” describing the ethics approval for your work. Below, you will also be asked to provide details of the ethical approval for your study; this will be hidden from reviewers but may be used by the program chairs if a query arises from the reviewers.
Check the checkbox “I have read and understood the ACM Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification; in particular, no version of this work is under submission elsewhere.”. Make sure to disclose possible overlap with your own previous work (“redundant publication”) to the ICER Program Committee co-chairs.
Check the checkbox “I have read and understood the ICER Anonymization Policy” (see below).

ICER Anonymization Policy

ICER research paper submissions will be reviewed using a double-anonymous process: the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers and the reviewers do not know the identity of the authors. To ensure this:

Avoid titles that indicate a clearly identifiable research project.
Remove author names and affiliations. (If you are using LaTeX, you can start your document declaration with \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} to easily anonymize these.
Avoid referring to yourself when citing your own work.
Redact (just for review) portions of positionality statements that would identify you within the community (perhaps due to demographics shared by few others).
Avoid references to your affiliation. For example, rather than referring to your actual university, you might write “A Large Metropolitan University (ALMU)” rather than “Auckland University of Technology (AUT)”.
Redact any other identifying information such as contributors, course numbers, IRB names and numbers, grant titles and numbers, from the main text and the acknowledgements.
Omit author details from the PDF you generate, such as author name or the name of the source document. These are often automatically inserted into exported PDFs, so be sure to check your PDF before submission.

Do not simply cover identifying details with a black box, as the text can easily be seen from under the box by dragging the cursor over it, and will still be read by screen readers.

Work that is not sufficiently anonymized will be desk-rejected by the PC chairs without offering an option to redact and resubmit.

Authoring Guidelines

The ICER conference maintains an evolving author guide, full of recommendations about scope, statistics, qualitative methods, theory, and other concerns that may arise when drafting your submission. These guidelines are used byreviewers; study them closely as you plan your research and prepare your submission.

Conflict of Interests

The SIGCSE Conflict of Interest policy applies to all submissions. You can review how conflicts will be managed by consulting our reviewer training, which details our review process.

Submission Format and Publication Workflow

Papers submitted to the research track of ICER have to be prepared according to the ACM TAPS workflow system. Read this page carefully to understand the new workflow.

Starting in 2021, ICER switched to a publication format (called TAPS) that separates content from presentation in support of accessibility. This means that the submission format and the publication format differ. For submission, we standardize on a single-column presentation.

The submission template is either the single column Word Submission Template or the single column LaTeX (using the “manuscript,review,anonymous” style available in template, which you can see an example of in the sample-manuscript.tex example in the LaTeX master template samples). Reviewers will review in this single column format. You can download these templates on the ACM Master Article Templates page. If you use LaTeX and Overleaf, this is the template you need: ACM Conference Proceedings Primary Article Template, but adjust the \documentclass as specified above.
The publication template is either the single column Word Submission Template or LaTeX template using “sigconf” and “manuscript” styles in acmart. You can download the templates on the ACM TAPS workflow page page, where you can also see example papers using the TAPS-compatible Word and LaTeX templates. If your paper is accepted, you will use the TAPS system to generate your final publication outputs. This will involve more than just submitting a PDF, requiring you to instead submit your Word or LaTeX source files and fix any errors in your source before the final version deadline listed above. The final published versions will be the ACM two-column conference PDF format (as well as XML, HTML, and ePub formats in the future).

For LaTeX users, be aware that there is a list of approved LaTeX packages for use with ACM TAPS. Not all packages are allowed.

For clarity, your paper should have a single column. If you have two columns, you have done it wrong. Your paper should look like this (LaTeX on the left, Word on the right, click for full-sized image):

Submission Length

Authors may submit papers following the formatting described above up to 18 pages excluding references. In other words: scroll to the 19th page (and beyond) in your PDF. If they don’t exist, or have only references, you’re fine. Authors who feel the 18 pages are insufficient due to the nature of their research methods can request up to 3 additional pages. If you wish to include the additional three pages, fill in the section on the submission form to justify why you need those additional pages. If applicable, reviewers will be asked to evaluate whether these additional pages are necessary.

ICER papers must be self-contained in the sense that reviewers can assess the contribution without referring to any external material. Appendices in the submitted PDF are considered to be part of the main text and thus are subject to the page count (and should appear before the references). If authors want to provide additional material, e.g., codebooks, they must do so in an anonymized way via an external web resource of their choice; reviewers will neither be required nor asked, however, to consult such resources when assessing a paper’s contribution.

Acceptance and Conditional Acceptance

All papers recommended for acceptance after the Senior PC meetings are either accepted or conditionally accepted. For accepted papers, there is no resubmission required other than the final camera-ready version. For conditionally-accepted papers, meta-reviews will indicate one or more minor revisions that are necessary for final acceptance; authors are responsible for submitting these revisions to HotCRP prior to the “Conditional Accept revisions due” deadline in the Call for Papers. The Senior PC and Program Chairs will review the final revisions; if they are acceptable, the paper will be officially accepted, and authors will have one week to submit an approved camera-ready version to TAPS for publication. If the Senior PC and Program Chairs judge that the request for revisions were not suitably addressed, the paper will be rejected.

Because the turnaround time for conditional acceptance is only one week, requested revisions will necessarily be minor: they may include presentation issues or requests for added clarity or details helpful for future readers of the archived paper. New results, new methodological details that change the interpretation of the results, or other substantially new content will neither be asked for nor allowed to be added.

Research PapersICER 2025