Posts tagged ‘public policy’
England: Time to replace Computer Science with Computing
This is policy wonk stuff, but I find policy fascinating. As a researcher, it’s hard to figure out “How are most people (students, faculty, whatever) in this field thinking about X?” Policy-makers have to figure that out, too, and then have to respond. A change in policy is like a research paper that says, “We found that the status quo wasn’t working anymore.”
The English government has just conducted an independent review of all their school curricula (see report here). The review is critical of how Computer Science is working in English schools today. They say that Computing now pervades all disciplines and “digital literacy” should be taught in an integrated manner. I recommend reading the report — it’s accessible and covers a bunch of important issues, like who is taking CS and where there’s a split between policy and practice.
One of the explicit recommendations is that the government:
Replaces GCSE Computer Science with a Computing GCSE which reflects the full breadth of the Computing curriculum and supports students to develop the digital skills they need.
The government response (linked here) agrees:
We agree with the Review that the computing curriculum should be the main vehicle for teaching about digital literacy, and we are confident that delivering the computing recommendations will provide more pupils with valuable digital skills that are essential for the future.
It is also clear that, in some subjects, digital methods now influence the content and how it is taught. We will work with experts to assess the validity of digital practice in these subjects, the evidence of whether this can be done robustly and whether it merits inclusion in the new curriculum. Where it does, we will include a requirement for the relevant digital content in those subjects’ programmes of study and we will ensure that it aligns with the computing curriculum, to reduce the risk of duplication.
We will also replace the computer science GCSE with a broader offer that reflects the entirety of the computing curriculum whilst continuing to uphold the core principles of computer science such as programming and algorithms, and explore the development of a level 3 qualification in data science and AI.
Bottomline: CS just isn’t the thing anymore. Computing and computing across the curriculum is what is needed.
As a director of a Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences, and someone who spent 25 years in a College of Computing, I wholly endorse this change and welcome it. As I described in a blog post from a couple of years back, “computer science” was originally invented to be a broad subject to be taught to everyone. Over the last 60 years, “computer science” has become more narrow (e.g., overly emphasizing algorithms while de-emphasizing building and creativity and social impacts, as Sue Sentance describes in this blog post, while “computing” represents a broader perspective. When we think about what should be taught to everyone in secondary school, Computing (and digital literacy, as the reports suggest) are more appropriate than what we now mean when we say Computer Science.
School teachers don’t need to recruit students into CS: An alternative model for K-12 computing education
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is in the process of updating their influential standards. It’s a long process, and it started last summer with a visioning document called “Reimagining CS Pathways.” Part of their new reimagining includes dispositions which are meant to cross all content and skill areas.
I am arguing here that “Sense of Belonging in CS” should not be in that set. The role of computing education in K-12 should be to introduce students to computing for whatever they are going to do in life. As I’ve been pointing out in the last few blog posts, the uses of programming in science, arts, and humanities don’t look like CS classes. Computing education is different than CS education, as I described in the blog post that started this series. K-12 computing education should not be about convincing students that they belong in CS, but should be about giving them the confidence that they can use computing in whatever career they choose.
I made a critique of this dispoition on social media, and the responses suggested that I look more carefully at the document. I was told that there is strong research supporting the need for “sense of belonging in CS.”
Here’s the text of the document introducing this disposition:
A sense of belonging, or the “personal involvement (in a social system) to the extent that the student feels that they are an indispensable and integral part of the system” (Anant, 1967, p. 391), is one of the more widely researched dispositions in CS education. Its importance is linked to its relationship to a student’s sense of their own ability in (Veilleux et al., 2013) and interest in persisting in their studies (Hansen et al., 2023). Sense of belonging is an important facet of ensuring equity in CS, since this sense often differs by student demographic group (Krause-Levy et al., 2021).
That’s a really strong definition of “sense of belonging.” I don’t think that even the most welcoming undergraduate CS classes and programs aim to make students feel that they are “an indispensable and integral part” of computer science. I looked up all three of these references (and linked each of them above). Here is the first sentence of each of those papers:
- Veilleux et al., 2013: “Retaining students in computer science majors has been a persistent topic among computer science educators for almost two decades.”
- Hansen et al., 2023: “The purpose of this longitudinal investigation was to examine the effectiveness of a comprehensive, integrated curricular and co-curricular program designed to build community, provide academic and social support, and promote engagement in academically purposeful activities resulting in more equitable environments for historically underrepresented, low-income science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) information technology (IT) students.”
- Krause-Levy et al., 2021: “Students’ sense of belonging has been found to be connected to student retention in higher education.”
None of these are about K-12 education. All of them are about CS, IT or STEM majors in higher education. The goal of “sense of belonging in CS” is undergraduate retention in the higher-education major in these papers, not K-12 students persistence at learning computing that is useful for them. The goal of K-12 education is to prepare students to be CS, IT, or STEM majors — or arts, humanities, business, or anything else majors, or to be successful citizens in a technological society, even if they don’t go to college. I don’t see any literature cited in the document that tells us how important a “sense of belonging in CS” is to K-12 students and their success in learning about computing.
An Alternative: Everyday Computing
We need a model for K-12 computing education that recognizes the value of alternative endpoints, as Tissenbaum, Weintrop, Holbert, and Clegg have described it (BJET link, UIUC repository link). K-12 CS education should not be a jobs program for technology companies.
Here’s an alternative model. The University of Chicago has a mathematics curriculum called “Everyday Mathematics.” Here’s how they describe it:
Everyday Mathematics is a research-based and field-tested curriculum that focuses on developing children’s understandings and skills in ways that produce life-long mathematical power.
The Everyday Mathematics curriculum emphasizes:
Use of concrete, real-life examples that are meaningful and memorable as an introduction to key mathematical concepts.
…
Each grade of the Everyday Mathematics curriculum is carefully designed to build and expand a student’s mathematical proficiency and understanding. Our goal: to build powerful mathematical thinkers.
I didn’t study Everyday Mathematics when I was a kid, but the description resonates with how I remember my own math classes. I saw math problems relating to cooking, engineering, craft, orienteering, map making, and lots of other domains. The mathematics education was contextualized to support students in seeing the connections and relevance of mathematics to their lives, to what they thought was important. My mathematics teachers were preparing us to be mathematical thinkers, not necessarily mathematicians. I enjoy mathematics, and use it often, but I don’t think of myself belonging in math.
We need Everyday Computing. Our goal in K-12 education should be to build powerful computational thinkers. We need to relate computing education to the things in students’ everyday lives, and that they’re likely to see in their lives. At the second and post-secondary level, we should help students to think about the computing that they’re already using, like R and Python, with vector operations and a focus on data over algorithms. We need school teachers to show students that computing is for them, not that they belong in computing.
Recently, the CS for California organization rewrote their mission and vision statements. I like them as a model for what CS education should be nationally.
Our New Mission: Advance equitable computer science education for all California students by fostering inclusive engagement and community partnerships, strengthening support for educators, and informing policy through data.
Our Vision for the Future: California students are equipped with foundational computing competencies to become innovative thinkers and creators of a just and inclusive future.
It’s not about creating computer scientists or technology workers, though those are possible endpoints. It’s about supporting students whatever they want to become and using computing to get there.
Considering the Danish Informatics Curriculum: Comparing National Computer Science Curricula
Michael Caspersen invited me to review a chapter on the Danish Informatics curriculum (see a link here). He asked me to compare it to existing school CS curriculum with which I’m familiar. That was an interesting idea — how does anyone relate curricula across diverse contexts, even between nations? I gave it a shot. I most likely missed, in that there are many curricula that I don’t know or don’t know well enough. I welcome comments on other CS curricula.
The Danish Informatics curriculum is unique for its focus on four competence areas:
- Digital empowerment which describes the ability to review and critique digital artifacts to ask where the strict demands of a computational system may not serve well the messy world in which humans live.
- Digital design and design processes which describes the ways in which designers come to understand the problem domain for which we design digital artifacts.
- Computational thinking and modeling which describes how data and algorithms are used to construct digital solutions and artifacts.
- Technological knowledge and skills which describes the tools (e.g., programming languages) and infrastructures (e.g., computer systems, networking) used to construct digital solutions and artifacts.
I am not familiar with any curriculum that encompasses all four competencies. I’m most familiar with elementary and high school curricula in the United States. Each US state has control over its own school system (i.e., there is no national curriculum) though many are influenced by recommendations from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) (see link here) and the K12 CS Framework (link here).
In the United States, most computing curricula focus on technological knowledge and skills and computational thinking and modeling. The former is important because the economic argument for computing education in schools is the most salient in the United States. The latter most often appears as a focus on learning computing skills without programming, e.g., like in the CS Unplugged activities from Tim Bell at the University of Canterbury (link).
Modeling is surprising rare in most state curricula. Calls for modeling and simulation are common in US mathematics and science education frameworks like the Next Generation Science Standards (link), but these have influenced few state curricula around computing education. Efforts to integrate computing to serve the needs of mathematics and science education are growing, but only a handful of states actively promote computing education to support mandatory education. For example, Indiana has include computing learning objectives in their state’s science education standards, in order to develop more integrated approaches.
I don’t know of any state curricula that include digital empowerment nor digital design and design processes. These are critically important. Caspersen’s arguments for the Danish Informatics curriculum build on quotes from Henry Kissinger and Peter Naur, but could also build on the work of C.P. Snow and Alan Perlis (the first ACM Turing Award laureate). In 1961, Snow and Perlis both argued for mandatory computing (though at the University level). Perlis argued that computing gave us new ways to understand the world. He would have recognized the digital design and design processes competency area. Snow warned that everyone should learn computing in order to understand how computing is influencing our world. He wrote: “A handful of people, having no relation to the will of society, having no communication with the rest of society, will be taking decisions in secret which are going to affect our lives in the deepest sense.” He would recognize the concerns of Kissinger and Naur, and the importance of digital empowerment.
The Danish Informatics curriculum is unique in its breadth and for considering the social aspects of computing artifacts and design. It encompasses important needs for citizens of the 21st Century.
Broadening Participation in Computing is Different in Every State: Michigan as an Example
In December, Rick Adrion, Sarah T. Dunton, Barbara Ericson, Renee Fall, Carol Fletcher, and I published an essay in Communications of the ACM, “U.S. States Must Broaden Participation While Expanding Access to Computer Science Education.” (See link here, and pre-print available at the bottom of this post.). Rick, Renee, Barb, and I were the founders of the ECEP Alliance which helps states and US territories with their computing education policy and practices. Carol is now the PI on ECEP (which feels so great to say — ECEP continues past the founders, with excellent leadership) — the whole leadership team is here. Sarah likely knows more about state-level computing education policy than anyone else in the US. She has worked with individual teams in individual states for years. Our argument is that broadening participation and expanding access are not the same thing. Simply making CS classes available doesn’t get students into those classes. We tell the story of two states (Nevada and Rhode Island) and how CS Ed is growing there.
Barbara and I now live in Michigan. The CSTA, Code.org, and ECEP report 2020 State of Computer Science Education: Illuminating Disparities (see link here) has a sub-report for every US state. Michigan is on page 56. The press release for the 2020 report says that 47% of US high schools now offer CS. Michigan is at 37%. Michigan is the only state (as far as I can tell) that used to have CS teacher certification and pre-service CS but got rid of it (story here).
Also in December, Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released the first “State of Computer Science in Michigan Report” (see link here). The data collection and writing on the report was led by Aman Yadav and Sarah Gretter of Michigan State with Cheryl Wilson of MDE. A quote from page 11: “The trend of declining course offerings continues at the high school level where even fewer high schools offer CS courses. Code.org course offering data suggests that only 23.7% of rural high schools, 28% of town high schools, 29.1% of sub-urban high schools, and 21.7% of city high schools offer CS.” (The numbers on the website are lower than these — Aman and Cheryl kindly sent me an early peek at a revision that they’re posting soon.)
MDE’s numbers are a lot lower than the 37% in the Code.org/CSTA/ECEP report. What’s going on here? My best guess is that CS is rare enough in Michigan that not everybody who fills out a survey knows what the national CS education movement means by “computer science.” We had this a lot in the early days of “Georgia Computes,” too. A principal would say that they teach CS, when they might mean Microsoft Office or Web design (with no HTML, CSS, or JavaScript).
In any case, Michigan is clearly below national averages on providing CS education to its citizens and creating sustainable CS education policy. How do we help Michigan progress in providing computing education to its citizens?
I don’t know. Aman, Barb, and I have had conversations about the potential for growing CS Ed in Michigan. We don’t have the same leverage points in Michigan that we have had in other ECEP states. Michigan is a local control state. Individual local education agencies (LEA’s — sometimes a school district, sometimes a county-wide collection of districts) can make up their own rules on important issues like CS teacher certification. In Georgia and South Carolina, the state government has a lot of control in education, so there was a point of leverage. California is also a local control state, but the California University systems are important to all high schools, so that’s a point of influence. Massachusetts is again a local control state, but the Tech industry is very important to the Boston area, and that’s important to the state. Tech isn’t important in the same way in Michigan. If you read the MDE report, there’s a lot of ambivalence about CS in the state. Administrators aren’t that excited about teaching CS. They don’t see CS education as important for their students. Michigan is a big state, where agriculture and tourism are two of the most significant industries. Manufacturing is a big deal, but manufacturing workers don’t necessarily need to know much about computing. CS isn’t an obvious benefit to much of Michigan.
Aman’s strategy is to grow CS education in the state slowly, to develop pockets of value for CS and success in teaching CS. We have to plant seeds and grow to a critical mass, which seems like the right approach to me. He has projects where he is helping develop teachers and relevant curriculum for CS education in specific counties. He works closely with the MDE. Sarah is involved with Apple’s Developer Academy to open in Detroit (see story here). Michigan does have a powerful and large teacher’s group supporting educational technology, MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, see website), which could be a significant player in growing CS education in the state.
The important point here is that, in the United States, growing CS education is a state-by-state challenge. Each state has its own story and issues.
Pre-print of CACM BPC article
Defining CS Ed out of existence: Have we made CS too hard to learn and teach?
“If computing increasingly means CS, it looks likely that hundreds of thousands of students, particularly girls and poorer students, will be disenfranchised from a digital education over the next few years.”
He was quoting an article from the New Statesman which can be found here. It describes the history of the rise of the CS curriculum in England. The key paragraph for me is:
The new curriculum was failing. While a tougher course had been introduced, few students were taking it and even fewer teachers could teach it. In many cases, even those who could felt uncomfortable doing so.
The government read the reports and has decided to respond. There’s now an enormous investment in England in trying to train new teachers. The question is whether that’s the right investment.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the headline of this May 2019 article is “Teachers and students in decline: the computing ‘crisis’ in Scotland’s schools.”
Experts are urging the Scottish Government to take radical steps to boost computing science education to prevent the subject from being squeezed out of schools.
The teaching of computing in schools is in “crisis”, practitioners have told The Ferret, with classes shrinking and teachers in short supply. The latest official data shows that the number of children studying the subject declined last year, while the number of teachers has fallen over the last decade.
Despite a national focus on delivering science and technology education and economic development, schools are finding it increasingly difficult to teach computing science to young people, critics say.
Let’s explicitly consider the questions raised in these two articles. Have we defined CS education in such a way that it’s too hard to teach? That it’s not interesting to learn? Maybe that it’s too hard to learn?
I’ve been writing in the last few months about the surprisingly low uptake of CS education in the United States (for example, in this CACM Blog post). No more than 5% of high school students in any US state are getting any CS classes, from the data available. There is value in setting high standards for CS education (as Alan Kay has been arguing), but that’s an argument for the end goal. Where do we start with CS education? How quickly can and will students learn CS education? What does it mean for something to be too hard to teach or too hard to learn?
Overall, US is following a similar strategy as in England and Scotland for computing in K-12: standalone CS classes, heavy emphasis on in-service teacher development, and counting the number of students in CS classes and the number of teachers leading those classes. There is integrated CS in the US, but as far as I know, no state is tracking those numbers. Public policy tends to focus on things that can be measured. Most of the argument against integration says that too little CS is covered in integrated forms. 95% of US students getting no CS at all is even less coverage than CS in integrated forms.
Let’s consider two hypotheses:
Hypothesis #1: We know how to teach computer science in such a way that all students can learn what they need to be technically-literate citizens, or even to develop the prerequisite knowledge they need to be software professionals. We have not yet achieved this goal because we do not have enough teachers to implement the curriculum. Larger investments in teacher development (perhaps including stipends or better pay to CS teachers) would allow us to scale CS Ed to reach everyone.
Hypothesis #2: We have defined computer science education in a way that is too hard to teach (so too few teachers are unwilling to teach it), and that is too hard to learn (which includes not being motivating enough to recruit students or engage student interest in order to achieve learning).
Given the evidence we have in the US, England, and Scotland, which hypothesis is better supported? You may have a Hypothesis #3 or #4 which is also well-supported by the evidence — I am very interested in hearing it.
In general, we tend to take the “insider view” of CS Ed, as Kahneman warned about (see excerpt here). If you step outside CS Ed, are we making progress along a trajectory that leads to CS education for all? And how long is that trajectory? If you were an Education faculty member and learned that CS had less than 5% of US high school students enrolled, wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider it a fad and likely to pass?
As I wrote in my blog post about what I got wrong in the last decade, I no longer think that CS for All is a matter of access. We have to figure out how to improve participation. I’m in support of Hypothesis #2. We need to re-think what and how we teach CS education. Because of my work these days, I suspect that we made a mistake at the design level. I was involved in the early days of the AP CS Principles (AP CSP) process. Most of the AP CSP curricula I’m aware of were developed by and tested with some of the best CS teachers in the US. That design and development process doesn’t promise a curriculum that many teachers can teach and that most students will learn from.
I just got back from a three day visit in Norway, where they are about to roll-out an integration of CS activities (explicitly programming) into mathematics, science, music, and arts & crafts classes. (See workshop about this topic here.). Maybe that would result in more students learning some computer science. Did US, England, and Scotland make a mistake by emphasizing standalone CS classes over integration?
An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools: Miranda Parker’s Defense
Miranda Parker defends her dissertation this Thursday. It’s a really fascinating story, trying to answer the question: Why does a high school in Georgia decide (or not) to offer computer science? She did a big regression analysis, and then four detailed case studies. Readers of this blog will know Miranda from her guest blog post on the Google-Gallup polls, her SCS1 replication of the multi-lingual and validated measure of CS1 knowledge, her study of teacher-student differences in using ebooks, and her work exploring the role of spatial reasoning to relate SES and CS performance (work that was part of her dissertation study). I’m looking forward to flying down to Atlanta and being there to cheer her on to the finish.
Title: An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools
Miranda Parker
Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. Candidate
School of Interactive Computing
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2019
Time: 10AM to 12PM EST
Location: 85 5th Street NE, Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), 2nd floor, Room 223
Committee:
Dr. Mark Guzdial (Advisor), School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Betsy DiSalvo, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Rebecca E. Grinter, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Willie Pearson, Jr., School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Leigh Ann DeLyser, CSforAll Consortium
Abstract:
There is a growing international movement to provide every child access to high-quality computing education. Despite the widespread effort, most children in the US do not take any computing classes in primary or secondary schools. There are many factors that principals and districts must consider when determining whether to offer CS courses. The process through which school officials make these decisions, and the supports and barriers they face in the process, is not well understood. Once we understand these supports and barriers, we can better design and implement policy to provide CS for all.
In my thesis, I study public high schools in the state of Georgia and the supports and barriers that affect offerings of CS courses. I quantitatively model school- and county-level factors and the impact these factors have on CS enrollment and offerings. The best regression models include prior CS enrollment or offerings, implying that CS is likely sustainable once a class is offered. However, large unexplained variances persist in the regression models.
To help explain this variance, I selected four high schools and interviewed principals, counselors, and teachers about what helps, or hurts, their decisions to offer a CS course. I build case studies around each school to explore the structural and people-oriented themes the participants discussed. Difficulty in hiring and retaining qualified teachers in CS was one major theme. I frame the case studies using diffusion of innovations providing additional insights into what attributes support a school deciding to offer a CS course.
The qualitative themes gathered from the case studies and the quantitative factors used in the regression models inform a theory of supports and barriers to CS course offerings in high schools in Georgia. This understanding can influence future educational policy decisions around CS education and provide a foundation for future work on schools and CS access.
Why high school teachers might avoid teaching CS: The role of industry
Fascinating blog post from Laura Larke that helps to answer the question: Why isn’t high school computing growing in England? The Roehampton Report (pre-release of the 2019 data available here) has tracked the state of computing education in England, which the authors describe as a “steep decline.” Laura starts her blog post with the provocative question “How does industry’s participation in the creation of education policy impact upon what happens in the classroom?” She describes teachers who aim to protect their students’ interests — giving them what they really need, and making judgments about where to allocate scarce classroom time.
What I found were teachers acting as gatekeepers to their respective classrooms, modifying or rejecting outright a curriculum that clashed with local, professional knowledge (Foucault, 1980) of what was best for their young students. Instead, they were teaching digital skills that they believed to be more relevant (such as e-safety, touch typing, word processing and search skills) than the computer-science-centric content of the national curriculum, as well as prioritising other subjects (such as English and maths, science, art, religious education) that they considered equally important and which competed for limited class time.
Do we see similar issues in US classrooms? It is certainly the case that the tech industry is painted in the press as driving the effort to provide CS for All. Adam Michlin shared this remarkable article on Facebook, “(Florida) Gov. DeSantis okay with substituting computer science over traditional math and science classes required for graduation.” Florida is promoting CS as a replacement for physics or pre-calculus in the high school curriculum.
“I took classes that I enjoyed…like physics. Other than trying to keep my kids from falling down the stairs in the Governor’s mansion I don’t know how much I deal with physics daily,” the governor said.
The article highlights the role of the tech industry in supporting this bill.
Several top state lawmakers attended as well as a representative from Code.org, a Seattle-based nonprofit that works to expand computer science in schools. Lobbyists representing Code.org in Tallahassee advocated for HB 7071, which includes computer science initiatives and other efforts. That’s the bill DeSantis is reviewing.
A Microsoft Corporation representative also attended the DeSantis event. Microsoft also had lobbyists in Tallahassee during the session, advocating for computer science and other issues.
The US and England have different cultures. Laura’s findings do not automatically map to the US. I’m particularly curious if US teachers are similarly more dubious about the value of CS curricula if it’s perceived as a tech industry ploy.
Barbara Ericson’s AP CS Report for 2018 and her new blog cs4all.home.blog
Barb has written her blog post about the 2018 AP data (see 2017 report here and 2016 report here), and this year, she’s using it to launch her own blog! Find it at https://cs4all.home.blog/
Every year I gather and report on the data for AP CS from the College Board which is at http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/
There was a huge increase in Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science Principles (CSP) exam takers nationally (from 43,780 in 2017 to 70, 864 in 2018 – a 62% increase). The Computer Science A (CSA) exam also grew (from 56,088 in 2017 to 60,040 in 2018 – a 7% increase).
Source: AP CS Report for 2018
The biggest concerns for institutionalized CS education in the United States: Standards, limited models, and undergraduate enrollment caps
I was interviewed for the SIGCSE Bulletin by my long-time collaborator, Leo Porter (see https://sigcse.org/sigcse/files/bulletin/bulletin.51.1.pdf). I talk about this blog, how I started teaching in 1980, about Media Computation, and about what inspires me.
One of the questions relates to the recent discussion about standards and frameworks (see post here).
LP: You have worked with education public policymakers in “Georgia Computes!” and Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) over the last dozen years. What’s your biggest worry as US states start institutionalizing CS education?
I have two. The first is that the efforts to standardize CS education are making the bar too low. When the K-12 CS Ed Framework was being developed, decisions were being made based on how current teachers might respond. “Teachers don’t like binary, so let’s not include that” is one argument I heard. I realize now that that’s exactly the wrong idea. Standards should drive progress and set goals. Defining standards in terms of what’s currently attainable is going to limit what we teach for years. Computing education research is all about making it possible to teach more, more easily and more effectively. I worry about setting standards based on our limited research base, not on what we hope to achieve.
The second is that most of our decisions are being made around the assumption of standalone CS classes and having teachers with a lot of CS education. I just don’t see that happening at scale in the US. Even in the states with lots of CS teachers in lots of schools, a small percentage of students take those classes. This limits who sees computer science. To make CS education accessible for all, we have to be able to explore alternative models, like integrating computing education in other subjects without CS-specific teachers. If we only count success in CS education as having standalone CS classes, we are incentivizing only one model. I worry about building our policy to disadvantage schools that want to explore integrated models, or have to integrate because of the cost of standalone CS classes.
Since this interview, I have a third concern, that may be more immediate than the other two. This is what I wrote my CACM Blog on this month. The NYTimes just published an article “The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class” about the growing CS undergraduate enrollment and about the efforts by departments to manage the load. Departments used to talk about building capacity, but increasingly, the discussion is about capping or limiting enrollments. The reason why this is concerning is because we’ve been down this road before — see Eric Roberts’ history of CS capacity challenges. Our efforts to limit enrollment send a message about computer science being only for elites and being unwelcoming to non-CS majors. This is exactly opposed to the message that Code.org, CS for All, and the AP CS Principles exam is trying to send. We’re creating a real tension between higher education and the efforts to grow CS, and it may (as Eric suggests) send enrollments into the next dive.
How to organize a state (summit): From ECEP and NCWIT
Soon after we started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, we were asked: What should a state do first? If they want to improve CS Education, what are the steps?
We developed a four step model — you can see a three minute video on ECEP that includes the four step model here. It was evidence-based in the sense that, yup, we really saw states doing this. We had no causal evidence. I’m not sure that that’s possible in any kind of education public policy research.
One of those steps is “Organize.” Gather your allies. Have meetings where you CS Ed people rub elbows with the state public policymakers, like legislators and staffers in the Department of Education (or Department of Public Instruction, or whatever it’s called in your state).
A lot of states have had summits since then (see a list of some here). Now, working with the fabulous NCWIT team of communicators, graphic designers, and social scientists, ECEP has released a state summit toolkit. We can’t yet tell you how to organize a state. We can tell you how to organize a state summit.
From finding change agents to building a steering committee of diverse stakeholders, convenings play an important role in broadening participation in computing at the state level. ECEP and NCWIT have developed the State Summit Toolkit to assist leadership teams as they organize meetings, events, and summits focused on advancing K-16 computer science education.
Need for Reviewers for US Department of Education CS Education Grants – Guest Post from Pat Yongpradit
Pat Yongpradit of Code.org asked me to share this with everyone.
The US Department of Education has announced the EIR grant competition for FY 2019. This year EIR incorporates an exclusive priority for computer science with a focus on increasing diversity and equity in access, as compared to last year where the highlight was that CS was merged with STEM as a combined priority. See more detail in our blog.
There are many moving parts to the federal grant review and award process, including a merit-based review process. In order to adequately score grants featuring computer science, the US Department of Education must have enough reviewers with K-12 computer science education experience. There is more information on the merit-review process and the Department’s mechanism for selecting reviewers in this blog.
Code.org has been asked to put interested folks in touch with leaders of the EIR grant program. If interested, please send your CV to [email protected].
Having CS knowledgeable reviewers participating in the federal grant review process is crucial to maximizing the opportunity these grants present the field and our collective goal of expanding access to K-12 computer science.
Best,
Pat
Frameworks and Standards can be limiting and long-lasting: Alan Kay was right
Through the K-12 CS Framework process (December 2016, see the post here), Alan Kay kept saying that we needed real computer science and that the Framework shouldn’t be about consensus (see post here). I disagreed with him. I saw it as a negotiation between academic CS and K-12 CS.
I was wrong.
Now that I can see standards efforts rolling out, and can see what’s actually going into teacher professional development, I realize that Alan was right. Standards are being written to come up to but rarely surpass the Framework. All those ideas like bits and processes that I argued about — they were not in the Framework, so they are not appearing in Standards. The Framework serves to limit what’s taught.
Teachers are experts on what is teachable, but that’s not what a Framework is supposed to be about. A Framework should be about what the field is about, about what’s important to know. Yes, it needs to be a consensus document, but not a consensus about what goes into classrooms. That’s the role of Standards. A Framework should be a consensus about what computing is.
I think what drove a lot of our thinking about the Framework is that it should be achievable. There was a sense that states and organizations (like CSTA and ISTE) should be able to write standards that (a) meet the Framework’s goals and (b) could be measurably achieved in professional development — “Yup, the teachers understand that.” As I learn about the mathematics and science frameworks, it seems that their goal was to describe the field — they didn’t worry about achievable. Rather, the goal was that the Framework should be aspirational. “When we get education right for all children, it should look like this.”
Standards are political documents (something Mike Lach taught me and that Joan Ferrini-Mundy told ECEP), based on Frameworks. Because the K-12 CS Framework is expected to reflect the end state goal, Standards are being written a step below those. Frameworks describe the goals, and Standards describe our current plans towards those goals. Since the Framework is not aiming to describe Computer Science, neither do the state Standards that I’m seeing.
I told Alan about this realization a few weeks ago, and then the Georgia Standards came out for review (see page here). They are a case in point. Standards are political documents. It matters who was in the room to define these documents in this way.
Here’s the exemplar standard from the Grade 6-8 band:
Use technology resources to increase self-direction and self-regulation in learning, including for problem solving and collaboration (e.g., using the Internet to access online resources, edit documents collaboratively)
Can technology resources increase self-direction and self-regulation in learning? Maybe — I don’t know of any literature that shows that. But even if it can, why are these in the Computer Science standards?
The K-2 band comparable Standard is even more vague:
Recognize that technology provides the opportunity to enhance relevance, increase confidence, offer authentic choice, and produce positive impacts in learning.
I have no idea if computers can “increase confidence,” but given what we know about self-efficacy and motivation, I don’t think that’s a common outcome. Why is this in the Computer Science Standards?
There are lots of uses of the word “information.” None of them define information. The closest is here (again, grades 6-8), which lists a bunch of big ideas (“logic, sets, and functions”) but the verb is only that students should be able to “discuss” them:
Evaluate the storage and representation of data; Analyze how data is collected with both computational and non-computational tools and processes
- Discuss binary numbers, logic, sets, and functions and their application to computer science
- Explain that searches may be enhanced by using Boolean logic (e.g., using “not”, “or”, “and”)
What’s missing in the Framework is also missing in the Georgia standards.
- The word “bit” doesn’t appear anywhere in these standards — if there is no information, then it makes sense that students don’t need bits.
- The word “process” does, but mostly in the phrase “design process.” Then it shows up in the Grade 6-8 band, but in highly technical forms: “process isolation” and “boot process.”
- There are no names: No Turing, no Hopper. There is no history, so no grounding in where computer science came from and what the big and deep ideas are.
There are strange phrases like “binary language,” which I don’t understand.
This is from Georgia, where there is a strong video game development lobby. Thus, all students are expected (by Grades 6-8) to:
Develop a plan to create, design, and build a game with digital content for a specific target market.
And
Develop a visual model of a game from the Game Design Document (GDD).
And
Create a functional game, using a game development platform, based on the storyboards, wireframes, and comprehensive layout.
It’s clear that the Georgia Standards are the result of a political process.
The bottom line is that I now wish that we had made sure that the K-12 CS Framework reflected computer scientists’ understanding of Computer Science. It instead reflected K-12 classroom computer science as defined in 2016. They presume languages like Scratch and curricula like AP CS Principles. That’s reasonable in Standards that describe what goes into the classroom tomorrow, but Frameworks should describe a broader, longer-range thinking. Our
There are no plans that I’m aware of to define a new Framework. The Standards are still just being developed for many states, so they’re going to last for years. This is what Computer Science will be in the United States for the next couple decades, at least.
Analyzing CS in Texas school districts: Maybe enough to take root and grow
My Blog@CACM for this month is about Code.org’s decision to shift gradually the burden of paying for CS professional development to the local regions — see link here. It’s an important positive step that needs to happen to make CS sustainable with the other STEM disciplines in K-12 schools.
We’re at an interesting stage in CS education. 40-70% of high schools have CS, but the classes are pretty empty. I use Indiana and Texas as examples because they’ve made a lot of their data available. Let’s drill a bit into the Texas data to get a flavor of it, available here. I’m only going to look at Area 1’s data, because even just that is deep and fascinating.
Brownsville Intermediate School District. 13,941 students. 102 in CS.
Of the 10 high schools in Brownsville ISD, only two high schools have anyone in their CS classes. Brownsville Early College High School has 102 students in CS Programming (no AP CS Level A, no AP CSP). That probably means that one teacher has several sections of that course — that’s quite a bit. The other high school, Porter Early College High School has fewer than five students in AP CS A. My bet is that there is no CS teacher there, only five students doing an on-line class. That means for 10 high schools and 13K students, there is really only one high school CS teacher.
Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District, over 10K students, 92 students in CS.
This is a district that could grow CS if there was will. There are 6 high schools, but two are special cases: One with less than 5 students, and the other in a juvenile detention center. The other four high schools are huge, with over 2000 students each. In Economedes, that are only 9 students in AP CS A — maybe just on-line? Edinburg North and Robert R Vela high school each have two classes: AP CS A and CS1. With 21 and 14, I’m guessing two sections. The other has 43 and 6. That might be two sections of AP CS A and another of CS1, or two sections of AP CS A and 6 students in an on-line class. In any case, this suggests two high school CS teachers (maybe three) in half of the high schools in the district. Those teachers aren’t teaching only CS, but with increased demand and support from principals, the CS offerings could grow.
It’s fascinating to wander through the Texas data, to see what’s there and what’s not. I could be wrong about what’s there, e.g., maybe there’s only one teacher in Edinburg and she’s moving from school-to-school. Given these data, there’s unlikely to be a CS teacher in every high school, who just isn’t teaching any CS. These data are a great snapshot. There is CS in Texas high schools, and maybe there’s enough there to take root and grow.
A high-level report on the state of computing education policy in US states: Access vs Participation
Interesting analysis from Code.org on the development of policies in US states that promote computing education — see report here, and linked below. The map above is fascinating in that it shows how much computing education has become an issue in all but five states.
The graph below is the one I found confusing.
I’ve been corrected: the first bar says that where the school’s population is 0-25% from under-represented minority groups, 41% of those schools teach CS. Only 27% of mostly-minority schools (75%-100% URM, in the rightmost column) offer CS. This is a measure of which schools offer computer science.
The graph above doesn’t mean that there are any under-represented minority students in any CS classes in any of those high schools. My children’s public high school in Georgia was over 50% URM, but the AP CS class was 90% white and Asian kids. From the data we’ve seen in Georgia (for example, see this blog post), few high schools offer more than one CS class. Even in a 75% URM high school, it’s pretty easy to find 30 white and Asian guys. Of course, we know that there are increasing numbers of women and under-represented minority students in computer science classes, but that’s a completely different statistic from what schools offer CS.
I suspect that the actual participation of URM students in CS is markedly lower than the proportion in the school. In other words, in a high school with 25% URM, I’ll bet that the students in the CS classes are less than 25% URM. Even in a 75% URM high school, I’ll bet that CS participation is less than 75% URM.
Access ≠ participation.
Source: The United States for Computer Science – Code.org – Medium
ECEP has a new home at The University of Texas at Austin: First meeting this week at CSforAll
I can’t tell you how exciting this press release is for me. Rick Adrion, Renee Fall, Barbara Ericson, and I started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance (http://ecepalliance.org) in 2012 to provide states with support as they broadened participation in computing education. Six years later, we had 16 states and Puerto Rico involved — but we were ready to be done. We all four had worked on previous alliances (CAITE and Georgia Computes) and felt that the movement needed new leaders. I am so very pleased that Carol Fletcher and her wonderful team decided to carry on ECEP, and NSF has agreed to continue funding ECEP as it expands to TWENTY-THREE states and US territories!
ECEP (now based out of UT-Austin) will have its first meeting this week, at Wayne State University in Detroit (where Barbara and I first met in 1983) as part of the CSforAll summit.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the UT STEM Center a three-year $2.5 million grant to lead the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance. ECEP is one of eight Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances (BPC) funded by the NSF to increase the number and diversity of students in K-16 pathways. ECEP works with state leadership teams to achieve this goal through education policy reform. First launched in 2012 through an NSF grant to Georgia Tech and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ECEP has since grown through four phases from two states to sixteen and Puerto Rico. Building on the existing network of ECEP states noted in the map above, the ECEP leadership team is pleased to announce the fifth phase addition of six new states to the Alliance: Hawaii, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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