Doctoral ConsortiumSIGCSE Virtual 2026

The SIGCSE Virtual Doctoral Consortium (DC) enables doctoral candidates in computing education to explore and develop their research interests in a workshop environment with peers and a panel of established researchers. There is no cost to attend a DC. Additionally, accepted candidates will receive free conference registration.

Contact the DC chairs, dc@virtual2026.sigcse.org, for further information.

What is a SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium?

A SIGCSE Virtual DC has the following objectives:

• to provide a supportive setting for the discussion of doctoral research and research direction;
• to offer each candidate comments from researchers and other candidates outside their institution;
• to promote the development of a supportive community of scholars;
• to develop a new generation of researchers with information and advice on research and academic career paths;
• to support doctoral students in participating in the full SIGCSE Virtual conference to engage with other researchers and conference events.

Why You Should Attend a Doctoral Consortium

“As a new PhD student, one of the most helpful things for me was seeing the work of students who were ahead of me. I observed students in the middle and near the end asking questions about the research that was presented and about their studies. This helped tremendously because I could imagine a trajectory between my starting point and a PhD.”

Eligibility

Students are especially encouraged to apply early in their doctoral program (e.g., 1st year of a 3-year program or 2nd year of a 5 or 6-year program), but students at all stages are very welcome to apply.

Doctoral students are welcome if they:

• will not have defended their dissertation before the event.
• have conducted research on computing education.

If you have any questions, please contact the track chairs at dc@virtual2026.sigcse.org.

An application for a doctoral consortium should be a single PDF on EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigcsev2026) consisting of two sections:

Section 1

A two-page research description (the extended abstract) covering central aspects of your PhD work (ACM Template must be used). Only one author should be named in this description: the candidate applying for participation in the DC. If accepted, you will revise this two-page research description with feedback from the DC chairs, and it will be published in the proceedings of the SIGCSE Virtual.

For more details on the formatting of this part, see the Submission Templates section below.

Key points include the following, with the recommended section headings in bold:

• an abstract of approximately 250 words which gives readers a preview of your work;
• context and motivation that drives your dissertation research;
• a brief background/literature review of key works that frame your research;
• a hypothesis and/or problem statement;
• research goals;
• research methods;
• current and expected contributions;
• a list of references.

Section 2

The following appendices. These will be used by the selection committee to identify suitable participants for the DC. These do not need to conform to any particular template and will not be published:

• Appendix A: your concise current curriculum vitae (1-2 pages).
• Appendix B: a paragraph or a few questions to describe what you hope to get guidance on during the DC (i.e., a feedback request). A note of what other, if any, doctoral consortia you have attended.
• Appendix C: Please create a diagram and a diagram caption, which should be at most 1 page. Between the diagram and the diagram caption, you should attempt to capture the following information about your proposed work:
  • Research Activity (e.g., RQ addressed, software development, data collection, analysis)
  • Timing (e.g., month or semester for each activity)
  • Dependencies (e.g., identify what activities ideally or definitely need to be done before other activities)
  • Related Activities (e.g., provide information about what parts of the proposed research are not planned as parts of your dissertation, but are carried out by someone else or are likely to remain as future research)

Submitting a DC Proposal

Once you have assembled – and checked – your PDF file and the appendices, follow the instructions on the Deadlines and Submissions page, being sure to choose the Doctoral consortium submission category. The submission deadline is AOE Friday, 31 July 2026.

Doctoral Consortium Review Process

Your proposal will be reviewed by the SIGCSE Virtual DC Chairs with a goal of selecting students who we think will benefit from participation. Additionally, other criteria will be considered to ensure the group of accepted candidates reflect a breadth of backgrounds, topics, institutions, and stages of their PhD.

ACM SIGCSE membership is required for DC participation (not necessarily for the application).

You may attend more than one ACM SIGCSE Virtual DC; however, you can only receive support for one DC per year, and priority will be given to newcomers.

You may attend ACM SIGCSE Virtual doctoral consortia in different years; however, priority will be given to newcomers.

Before the Conference

Since the goals of the doctoral consortium include building scholarship and community, participants will be expected to read the extended abstracts of all accepted participants: being accepted into the consortium involves a commitment to giving and receiving thoughtful commentary.

Submission Templates

All DC submissions must be in English. Section 1, described above, must be formatted using the 2-column ACM SIG Conference Proceedings format and US letter size pages (8.5x11 inch or 215.9 x 279.4mm).

Page Limits: Section 1 of the DC submissions is limited to a maximum of 2 pages of body content (including all titles, author information, abstract, main text, tables and illustrations, acknowledgments, and supplemental material). One additional page may be included, which contains only references.

LaTeX Authors:

• Overleaf provides a suitable two-column SIG conference proceedings template.
• Other LaTeX users may alternatively use the ACM Primary template, adding the “sigconf” format option in the documentclass to obtain the 2-column format.
• NOTE: The default LaTeX template text shows appendix materials following the references. SIGCSE TS 2026 does not permit appendices on the optional page allotted for references. Authors must include all relevant content within the 2 body pages of the submission. MS Word Authors: Please use the interim Word template provided by ACM.

NOTE: We strongly encourage you to use LaTeX. MS Word is very difficult to set to a two-column format.

ACM Policies

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 (https://sigcsevirtual2026.acm.org/info/authorship-policies), including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/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.

ORCiD

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCID ID in advance of submitting your work.

ACM’s New Open-Access Publishing Model

Please review details of ACM’s new open-access publishing model at https://sigcsevirtual2026.acm.org/info/information-on-acm-open.

Questions

If you have questions about anything discussed above, please contact the doctoral consortium chairs, sigcsevirtual2026-dc@sigcse.org.