From Diary to Discussion: The PCAR Framework for Scaffolding Empathy-Oriented Learning in HCI Education

Abstract

Computing education has long emphasized functional implementation, technical correctness, and system building. As computing systems become increasingly embedded in real-world social contexts and everyday life, however, helping students understand user experience, contextual differences, needs and constraints, and the human impact of technical decisions has become an increasingly important educational goal. Yet for many undergraduate computing students, it remains challenging to shift from technical implementation to user understanding in human-computer interaction and to translate user needs into concrete system design decisions. Design empathy is an important capability for supporting this shift. Here, empathy does not simply refer to emotional resonance, but to the ability to understand users' situations, goals, constraints, and value judgments, and to bring that understanding into design thinking. This dissertation introduces diary study as a pedagogical approach in HCI and computing education, with the goal of helping students gradually develop user-oriented understanding and design judgment through sustained recording, analysis, and reflection on technology-use experiences. Through an exploratory comparison of conventional HCI learning activities, represented by observation and affinity diagramming, with diary recording alone, this dissertation finds that conventional HCI activities do not necessarily lead to stable gains in students' empathy, while sustained diary recording shows potential as an instructional scaffold. Building on this exploration and on established diary study practices in HCI, this dissertation translates the diary study research method into the Plan, Collect, Analyze, Reflect (PCAR) diary study framework. This framework supports students in turning real-world experiences into learning materials that can be recorded, analyzed, and discussed. In the Reflect stage of PCAR, this dissertation further designs and implements a reflection activity centered on focus group discussion, forming a diary-to-discussion learning process that moves from individual experience recording to collective reflection. Diary recording provides students with sustained, concrete, and contextualized materials from their own use experiences, allowing them to identify problems, emotional responses, and potential user needs through real interactions. Focus group discussion then gives students opportunities to encounter others' experiences, compare differences, revise judgments, and reconsider user contexts. To evaluate this learning process, the study uses the EMPA-D scale to measure changes in students' empathy at three stages: before the learning activities, after diary recording, and after focus group discussion. It also analyzes students' reflective feedback through qualitative coding. The results show that students' empathy-related abilities improved significantly after diary recording and continued to develop after focus group discussion. The qualitative findings further show that students not only reinforced and refined their existing user awareness but also deepened their understanding of users, contexts, and design tradeoffs while beginning to reexamine their own assumptions, judgments, and cognitive blind spots. Overall, this dissertation proposes and evaluates a PCAR-based diary study pathway for supporting empathy-oriented learning in HCI education, and offers a structured and practical pedagogical approach for human-centered learning in broader computing education.