Duke University Leaves Semester Online: Questions about long-term effects

Semester Online sounded like a nice idea — getting liberal arts focused institutions to share their online course offerings.  The pushback is interesting and reflects some of the issues that have been raised about sustainability of online education as a replacement for face-to-face learning or even as an additional resource.

While Dr. Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.

When 2U, the online education platform that would host the classes, announced Semester Online last year, it named 10 participants, including Duke, the University of Rochester, Vanderbilt and Wake Forest — none of which will be offering courses this fall. “Schools had to go through their processes to determine how they were going to participate,” said Chance Patterson, a 2U spokesman, “and some decided to wait or go in another direction.”

via Duke University Leaves Semester Online – NYTimes.com.

Requiring Computing Education: An Impractical Path to Computing Literacy

My thinking on computing education has been significantly influenced by a podcast about hand-washing and financial illiteracy. I suspect that education is an ineffective strategy for achieving the goal of Computing Literacy for Everyone. I have a greater appreciation for work like Alan Kay’s on STEPS, Andy Ko’s work on tools for end-user programming, and the work on Racket.

On Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy

I have been listening to Freakonomics podcasts on long drives. Last month, I listened to “What do hand-washing and financial illiteracy have in common?” I listened to it again over the next few days, and started digging into the literature they cited.

At hospitals, hand-washing is far less common than our knowledge of germ theory says it ought to be. What’s most surprising is that doctors, the ones with the most education in the hospital, are the least likely to wash their hands often enough. The podcast describes how one hospital was able to improve their hand-washing rates through other behavioral methods, like shaming those who didn’t wash their hands and providing evidence that their hands were likely to be filled with bacteria. More education doesn’t necessarily lead to behavioral change.

Much more important was the segment on financial illiteracy. First, they present the work of Annamuria Lusardia who has directly measured the amazing financial illiteracy in our country. There is evidence that much of the Great Recession was caused by poor financial decisions by individuals. Less than a third of the over-50-year-old Americans that Lusardia studied could correctly answer the question, “If you put $100 in a savings account with 2% annual interest, at the end of five years you will have (a) less than $102, (b) exactly $102, or (c) more than $102?” More mathematics background did lead to more success on her questions, but she calls for a much more concerted effort in financial education. Her arguments are supported by some pretty influential officials, like Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill. It makes sense: If people lack knowledge, we should teach them.

Lauren Willis strongly disagrees, and she’s got the data to back up her argument. She has a 2008 paper with the shocking title, Against Financial Literacy Education that I highly recommend. She presents evidence that financial literacy education has not worked — not that it couldn’t work, but it isn’t working. She cited several studies that showed negative effects of financial education. For example, high school students who participated in the Jump$start program become much more confident about their ability to make financial decisions, and yet made worse decisions than those students who did not participate in the program.

The problem is that financial decisions are just too complicated, and education (especially universal education) is expensive to do well (though Willis doesn’t offer an estimated cost). Educational curricula (even if tested successful) is not always implemented well. The gap between education in teen years and making decisions in your 40′s and 50′s is huge. Instead of education, we should try to prevent damage from ignorance. Willis suggests that we should create a cadre professional of financial advisors and make them available to everyone (for some “pro bono”), and that we should increase regulation of financial markets so that there are fewer riskier investments for the general public. It costs the entire society enormously when large numbers of people make poor financial decisions, and it’s even more expensive to provide enough education to prevent the cost of all that ignorance.

This was a radical idea for me. Education is not free, and sometimes it’s cheaper to prevent the damage of ignorance than correcting the ignorance.

Implications for Computing Literacy Education

I share the vision of Andy DiSessa and others of computing as a kind of literacy, and a goal of “Computing for All” where everyone has the knowledge and facility to build programs (for modeling, simulations, data analyses, etc.) for their needs. Let’s call that a goal of “Universal Computing Literacy,” and we can consider the costs of using education to reach that goal, e.g., “Universal Computing Education to achieve Universal Computing Literacy.”

The challenge of computing literacy may be even greater than the challenge of financial literacy. People know even less about computing than they do about finance. We don’t know the costs of that ignorance, but we do know that it has been difficult and expensive to provide enough education to correct that ignorance.

Computing may be even more complicated than finance. Willis talks about the myriad terms that people need to know to make good financial decisions (like “adjustable rate mortgages”), but they are at least compounds of English words! I attended a student talk this week, where terms like “D3” and “GreaseMonkey” were bandied about like they were common knowledge. We invent so much language all the time.

What could we possibly teach today in high school that will be useful in even five or ten years, when those students are in their careers, to be able to build something that they could use? “We’ll teach conceptual knowledge so that they can pick up any tools or languages they need.” We have no idea how to achieve this goal in computer science. It takes an enormous effort to develop transferable knowledge, and progress in computing changes the target task all the time. I have a PhD in Computer Science, and it takes me way too much effort to pick up JavaScript libraries that I might want to use — far more effort than a non-technical person will be willing to put in.

The problem is that education is often inefficient and ineffective. Jeremy Roschelle pointed out that education improvements rarely impact economic outputs. Greg Wilson shared a great paper with me in response to some tweets I sent about these ideas. Americans have always turned to education to solve a wide variety of ills, but surprisingly, without much evidence of efficacy. We can teach kids all about healthy eating, but we still have a lot of obesity. Smokers often know lots of details about how bad smoking is for them. Education does not guarantee a change of behavior. This doesn’t mean that education could not be made more effective and more efficient. But it might be even more expensive to fix education than to deal with ignorance.

Universal education is always going to be expensive, and some things are worth it. Text illiteracy and innumeracy are very expensive for our society. We need to address those, and we’re not doing a great job at that yet. Computing education to achieve real literacy is just not as important.

I am no longer convinced that providing computing education to everyone is going to be effective to reach the goal of making everyone computing literate, and I am quite convinced that it will be very expensive. Requiring computing education for STEM professionals at undergraduate level may still be cost-effective, because those are the professionals most likely to see the value of computing in their careers, which reduces the costs and makes the education more likely to be effective.

Barb sees a benefit in Universal Computing Education, but not to achieve Universal Computing Literacy. We need to make computing education available everywhere for broadening participation in computing. To get computing into every school, Barb argues that we have to make it required for everyone. Without the requirement, schools won’t go to the effort of including it. Without a requirement, female and URM students who might not see themselves in computing, would never even give it a chance. In response to my argument about cost, she argues that the computing education for everyone doesn’t have to be effective. We don’t have to achieve lifelong literacy for everyone. Merely, it has to give everyone exposure, to give everyone the opportunity to discover a love for computing. Those that find that love will educate themselves and/or will pursue more educational opportunities later. I heard Mike Eisenberg give a talk once many years ago, where he said something that still sticks with me: that the point of school is to give everyone the opportunity to find out what they’re passionate about. For that reason, we have to give everyone the chance to discover computing, and requiring it may be the only way to reach that goal.

It’s always possible that we’ll figure out to educate more effectively at lower cost. For example, integrating computing literacy education into mathematics and science classes may be cheaper — students will be using it in context, teachers in STEM are better prepared to learn and teach computing, and we may improve mathematics and science teaching along the way. My argument about being too expensive is based on what we know now how to do. Economic arguments are often changed by improved science (see Malthus).

As Willis suggests for financial literacy, we in computing literacy are probably going to be more successful for less cost by focusing on the demand side of the equation. We need to make computing easier, and make tools and languages that are more accessible, as Alan Kay, Andy Ko, and the Racket folks are doing. We have to figure out how to change computing so that it’s possible to learn and use it over an entire career, without a PhD in Computer Science. We have to figure out how to get these tools into use so that students see use of such tools as authentic and not a “toy.”

“Computing for All” is an important goal. “Access to Computing Education for All” is critical. “Universal Computing Education to achieve Universal Computing Literacy” is likely to be ineffective and will be very expensive. On the other hand, requiring computing education may be the only way to broaden participation in computing.

Beware of the High Cost of ‘Free’ Online Courses – NYTimes.com

It nice to see someone with a background in management making this argument, that the costs of MOOCs may be greater than the benefits.

Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep. The damage would occur, he writes in the article, “if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry — zero — which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo.”

In our conversation, I offered the obvious counterargument. Why should education necessarily be immune from this digital, Darwinian wave, when other industries are not? Isn’t this just further evidence of the march of disruptive progress that ultimately benefits society?

Mr. Cusumano has heard this reasoning before, and he is unconvinced. In the article, he explains, “I am mostly concerned about second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges, many of which play critical roles for education and economic development in their local regions and communities.”

“In education,” Mr. Cusumano adds, “‘free’ in the long run may actually reduce variety and opportunities for learning as well as lessen our stocks of knowledge.”

via Beware of the High Cost of ‘Free’ Online Courses – NYTimes.com.

We Need an Economic Study on Lost Productivity from Poor Computing Education

How much does it cost the American economy that most American workers are not computer literate?  How much would be saved if all students were taught computer science?

These questions occurred to me when trying to explain why we need ubiquitous computing education.  I am not an economist, so I do not know how to measure the costs of lost productivity. I imagine that the methods would be similar to those used in measuring the Productivity Paradox.

We do have evidence that there are costs associated with people not understanding computing:

• We know from Scaffidi, Shaw, and Myers that there are a great many end-user programmers in the United States.  Brian Dorn’s research on graphic designers identified examples of lost productivity because of self-taught programming knowledge.  Brian’s participants did useless Google searches like “javascript <variablename>” because they didn’t know which variable or function names were meaningful and which were arbitrary.  Brian saw one participant spend a half an hour studying a Web resource on Java, before Brian pointed out that he was programming in Javascript which was a different language.  I bet that many end-users flail like this — what’s the cost of that exploration time?
• Erika Poole documented participants failing at simple tasks (like editing Wikipedia pages) because they didn’t understand basic computing ideas like IP addresses.  Her participants gave up on tasks and rebooted their computer, because they were afraid that someone would record their IP address.  How much time is lost because users take action out of ignorance of basic computing concepts?

We typically argue for “Computing for All” as part of a jobs argument. That’s what Code.org is arguing, when they talk about the huge gap between those who are majoring in computing and the vast number of jobs that need people who know computing.  It’s part of the Computing in the Core argument, too.  It’s a good argument, and a strong case, but it’s missing a bigger issue.  Everyday people need computing knowledge, even if they are not professional software developers.  What is the cost for not having that knowledge?

Now, I expect Mike Byrne (and other readers who push back in interesting ways on my “Computing for Everyone” shtick) to point out that people also need to know about probability and statistics (for example), and there may be a greater cost for not understanding those topics.  I agree, but I am even harder pressed to imagine how to measure that.  One uses knowledge of probability and statistics all the time (e.g., when deciding whether to bring your umbrella to work, and whether you can go another 10K miles on your current tires). How do you identify (a) all the times you need that knowledge and (b) all the times you make a bad prediction because you don’t have the right knowledge?  There is also a question of whether having the knowledge would change your decision-making, or whether you would still be predictably irrational.  Can I teach you probability and statistics in such a way that it can influence your everyday decision making?  Will you transfer that knowledge?  I’m pretty sure that once you know IP addresses and that Java is not the same as JavaScript, you won’t forget those definitions — you don’t need far-transfer for that to be useful.  While it is a bit of a “drunk under the streetlight” argument, I can characterize the behaviors where computing knowledge would be useful and when there are costs for not having that knowledge, as in Brian and Erika’s work.  I am trying to address problems that I have some idea of how to address.

Consider this a call to economics researchers: How do we measure the lost productivity from computing illiteracy?

Teaching intro CS and programming by way of scientific data analysis

This class sounds cool and similar to our “Computational Freakonomics” course, but at the data analysis stage rather than the statistics stage. I found that Allen Downey has taught another, also similar course “Think Stats” which dives into the algorithms behind the statistics. It’s an interesting set of classes that focus on relevance and introducing computing through a real-world data context.

The most unique feature of our class is that every assignment (after the first, which introduces Python basics) uses real-world data: DNA files straight out of a sequencer, measurements of ocean characteristics (salinity, chemical concentrations) and plankton biodiversity, social networking connections and messages, election returns, economic reports, etc. Whereas many classes explain that programming will be useful in the real world or give simplistic problems with a flavor of scientific analysis, we are not aware of other classes taught from a computer science perspective that use real-world datasets. (But, perhaps such exist; we would be happy to learn about them.)

via PATPAT: Program analysis, the practice and theory: Teaching intro CS and programming by way of scientific data analysis.

Winning a six figure salary through learning the right computing technologies

An interesting list, and a not-unreasonable method of establishing them.  I wouldn’t have guessed that Java, Erlang, Silverlight, and Clojure would be on this list.

We asked job site Indeed.com to tell us which skills will command a salary of at least $100,000 a year. And that’s just salary — a new job might also net you bonuses, stock options and the like.

Indeed is one of the biggest job search sites on the ‘net with 1.5 billion job searches per month. It sifted through its massive database of job titles and descriptions and the salaries associated with them to come up with this list.

via 10 Tech Skills That Will Instantly Net You $100,000+ Salary – Business Insider.

Report on “Computational Freakonomics” Class: Olympics, game consoles, the Euro, and Facebook

I’ve told you a bit about how the Media Computation class went this summer, with the new things that I tried.  Let me tell you something about how the “Computational Freakonomics” (CompFreak) class went.

The CompFreak class wasn’t new.  Richard Catrambone and I taught it once in 2006.  But we’ve never taught it since then, and I’d never taught it before on my own, so it was “new” for me.  There were six weeks in the term at Oxford.  Each week was roughly the same:

• On Monday, we discussed a chapter from the “Freakonomics” book.
• We then discussed social science issues related to that chapter, from the nature of science, through t-tests and ANOVA, up to multiple linear regression.  Sometimes, we did a debate about issues in the chapter (e.g., on “Atlanta is a crime-ridden city” and on “Roe v. Wade is the most significant explanation for the drop in crime in the 1990′s.”)
• Then I showed them how to implement the methods in SciPy to do real analysis of some Internet-based data sets.  I give them a bunch of example data sets, and show them how to read data from flat text files and from CSV files.

At the end of the course, students do a project where they ask a question, any question they want from any database.  Then, they do it again, but in pair, after a bunch of feedback from me (both on the first project, and on their proposal for the final project).  The idea is that the final projects are better than the first round, since they get feedback and combine efforts in the pair.  And they were.

• One team looked at the so-called “medal slump” after a country hosts the Olympics.  The “medal slump” got mentioned in some UK newspapers this summer.  One member of the team had found in his first project that, indeed, the host country wins a statistically significant fewer medals in the following year.  But as a pair of students, they found that there was no medal “slump.”  Instead, during the Olympics of hosting, there was a huge medal “bump”!  When hosting, the country gets more medals, but the prior two and following two Olympics all follow the same trends in terms of medals won.
• Another team looked at Eurozone countries and how their GDP changes tracked one another after moving to the Euro, then tried to explain that in terms of monetary policy and internal trading.  It is this case that Eurozone countries who did move to the Euro found that their GDP started correlating with one another, much more than with non-Euro Eurozone countries or with other countries of similar GDP size.  But the team couldn’t figure out a good explanation for why, e.g., was it because internal trading was facilitated, or because of joint monetary policy, or something else?
• One team figured out the Facebook API (which they said was awful) and looked at different company’s “likes” versus their stock price over time.  Strongly correlated, but “likes” are basically linear — almost nobody un-likes a company.  Since stock prices generally rise, it’s a clear correlation, but not meaningful.
• Another team looked at the impact of new consoles on the video game market.  Video game consoles are a huge hit on the stock price of the developing company in the year of release, while the game manufacturers stock rises dramatically.  But the team realized a weakness of their study: They looked at the year of a console’s release.  The real benefit of a new console is in the long lifespan.  The year that the PS3 came out, it was outsold by the PS2.  But that’s hard to see in stock prices.
• The last team looked at impact of Olympics on the host country’s GDP.  No correlation at all between hosting and changes in GDP.  Olympics is a big deal, but it’s still a small drop in the overall country’s economy.

One of my favorite observations from their presentations: Their honesty.  Most of the groups found nothing significant, or they got it wrong — and they all admitted that.  Maybe it was because it was a class context, versus a tenure-race-influenced conference.  They had a wonderful honesty about what they found and what they didn’t.

I’ve posted the syllabus, course notes, slides that I used (Richard never used PowerPoint, but I needed PowerPoint to prop up my efforts to be Richard), and the final exam that I used on the CompFreak Swiki.  I also posted the student course-instructor opinion survey results, which are interesting to read in terms of what didn’t work.

• Clearly, I was no Richard Catrambone. Richard is known around campus for how well he explains statistics, and I learned a lot from listening to his lectures in 2006. Students found my discussion of inferential statistics to be the most boring part.
• They wanted more in-class coding! I had them code in-class every week. After each new test I showed them (correlation, t-test, ANOVA, etc.), I made them code it in pairs (with any data they wanted), and then we all discussed what they found in the last five minutes of class. I felt guilty that they were just programming away while I worked with pairs that had questions or read email. I guess they liked that part and wanted more.
• I get credit from the students for something that Richard taught me to do. Richard pointed out that his reading of cognitive overload suggests that nobody can pay attention for 90 minutes straight. Our classes were 90 minutes a day, four days a week. In a 90 minute class, I made them get up halfway through and go outside (when it wasn’t raining). They liked that part.
• Students did learn more about computing, inspired by the questions that they were trying to answer.  They talk in their survey comments about studying more Python on their own and wishing I’d covered more Python and computing.
• In general, though, they seemed to like the class, and encourage us to offer it on-campus, which we’ve not yet done.

Students who talked to me about the class at the end said that they found it interesting to use statistics for something.  Turns out that I happened to get a bunch of students who had taken a lot of statistics before (e.g., high school AP Statistics).  But they still liked the class because (a) the coding and (b) applying statistics to real datasets.  My students asked all kinds of questions, from what factors influenced money earned by golf pros, to the influences on attendance at Braves games (unemployment is much more significant than how much the team is in contention for the playoffs).  One of the other more interesting findings for me: GPD correlates strongly and significantly with number of Olympic gold medals that a country wins, i.e., rich countries win more medals. However, GPD-per-capita has almost no correlation. One interpretation: To win in the Olympics, you need lots of rich people (vs. a large middle class).

Anyway, I still don’t know if we’ll ever offer this class again, on-campus or study-abroad.  It was great fun to teach.  It’s particularly fun for me as an exploration of other contexts in contextualized computing education.  This isn’t robotics or video games.  This is “studying the world, computationally and quantitatively” as a reason for learning more about computing.

Cost of college remarkably stable « Gas station without pumps

I’ve been meaning to link to this analysis for awhile.  Daphne Koller mentions in her TED video that costs of college are skyrocketing.  Actually, the cost has stayed pretty much the same.  The tuition has risen, because the cost is being shifted from the state to the student.

Note that the funding (tuition+state funding) has varied from a low of $10,200 in 1993 to a high of $12,766 in 2011($11,483 ± 11%).  There is fluctuation, but not much, and no clear trend.  Public college costs have been remarkably stable over the last 25 years.  What has changed is who pays those costs.  In 1986, about 23% of the funding was from tuition, and in 2011, about 43% of the funding was from tuition.  Essentially all the change in tuition can be attributed to differences in state funding.

via Cost of college remarkably stable « Gas station without pumps.

Can and should schools spur social mobility?

Disturbing but fascinating piece linked below that suggests that the “super efficient” meritocracy of the United States quickly sorts out those with talent, who then marry each other, and over time, the gap between the upper classes and the lower classes becomes more than just opportunity.  The suggestion in this interview is that schools can’t really do much to fill in that gap.  The piece by Roschelle et al that I mentioned a few weeks ago suggests that schools can help the lower-performing groups improve their performance, but there is some question as to whether schools can really bridge the gap, or will the better-performing students just accelerate even more than the lower-performing?

And is that school’s jobs at all?  On my way out of Heathrow last Sunday morning, I read a news piece and an op-ed in The Telegraph, outraged that schools were accepting poorer children who did not have the grades to get in on their own.  Explicitly, the heading complained that the schools were engaged in “social engineering.”  In the US, we do talk about education as a leg-up, a way of enhancing social mobility.  But maybe that’s not a necessary role for school, and Murray would argue, school can’t achieve that goal anyway.

But this assumes that academic ability—whether defined as intelligence, or non-cognitive skills and character traits, or whatever else—is randomly distributed across the population. Which, Murray argues, was probably once true but is no longer. Because of the ferocious sorting of the meritocratic machine, talented people have been finding and marrying one another, and giving birth to a super-class of highly gifted children. (Murray said at our event that it “doesn’t matter” whether these gifts are bequeathed by nature or nurture. What matters is the strong link between the talents of parents and the talents of their offspring.) And, as David Brooks pointed out today, after years of bedtime stories, trips to the zoo, vocabulary-packed conversations, and other “enrichment” activities, these children enter school miles ahead of the rest of their peers—including the poor kids that are the focus of so many education reforms.

Of course, as Murray says, this phenomenon plays out in terms of group averages. If we live in a meritocracy where intelligence and other talents lead to success,* then the children of the highly successful (the Elite) will, on average, be more talented than the children of the somewhat successful, who will, on average, be more talented that the children of the not successful (i.e., the children of the poor). On average.

Understandably, we don’t much like to discuss this possibility. It gives cover to educators who look at a classroom of low-income children and diminish their expectations—thinking that “these kids” aren’t capable of much, educators who don’t buy the mantra that “all children can learn.” But would we be shocked to find that the average intelligence level of such a classroom is lower than a classroom in an elite, affluent suburb?

via Can schools spur social mobility?.

Economic impact of educational research: Does computing education research matter?

Most of the computing education research papers and proposals that I read make an economic justification for the work.  Sometimes the work is a response to “Rising above the Gathering Storm (RAGS),” and the goal is to generate more computing innovation to improve national competitiveness.  Maybe the concern is that our modern economy needs more and better computing workers to fuel our information-driven businesses, so we are exploring novel curricula to create better learning.  Maybe we want to have greater representation for women and under-represented minorities in order to provide great economic impact, so we strive to improve student attitudes about and engagement with computing among middle and high school students.  I’ve made all of these arguments myself.

I recently read “Eight issues for learning scientists about education and the economy” (Journal of the Learning Sciences, 20(1), 3-49, Jan 2011) by Jeremy Roschelle, Marianne Bakia, Yukie Toyama, and Charles Patton.  It has dramatically impacted my perception of these issues.  Jeremy and his colleagues dive into the economic literature, to understand the education research impact that economists can actually support.  The result helps me to think about why we do what we do.

To start with, economists have found that education researchers’ overall impact on the economy appears to be bounded.  For example, 1/3 of all new jobs predicted by the BLS from 2006-2016 do not require formal education. Instead, they “are projected to fall into the short-term on-the-job training category.”  40% of all job openings require less than one month of on-the-job training.  Most of those aren’t STEM jobs.  A 2006 study “found a relatively small positive association between math and science academic achievement and economic growth.”  Later studies (in 2007 and 2008) reanalyzed the data with varying results, but found that statistically significant results “which are most plausible with a 15-year time lag between educational improvement and economic benefits.”  So pushing for better STEM (with Computing in there) learning might have an impact on the economy, but we won’t see it for 15 years.

Part of the problem here is confounded variables.  If you have a nation-state with a strong interest in developmental policies, and the political will and economic might to put those policies into place, then good things are going to happen to the economy anyway — and far sooner than 15 years.

Let’s consider the competitiveness angle, which comes up often in computing education research.  There is certainly evidence that the United States test scores ranks far behind countries like Finland and Singapore.  But Roschelle et al. present evidence that the US is producing enough top scientists and engineers to support innovation, and the US’s poor showing is more a factor of size than of educational quality.  ”Furthermore, in the United States, is is possible to find regions the size of Singapore and Finland that also score as well as Singapore and Finland (Guarino, 2008; SciMathMN, 2008).”  Our bigger challenge is to reduce the variance in scores, which is the real reason for the low overall international performance.  They argue that reducing inequities in education “is good for equipping all students for not only better access to valued jobs in a knowledge economy but also for democratic participation.”  If you want to make the US more competitive in terms of international test scores, then don’t worry about the overall test score average — bring the bottom up, and the average will take care of itself.  However, test scores may not actually have anything to economic competitiveness, because the economists that Roschelle et al. cite don’t really believe RAGS.  We have enough top engineers and scientists, and the economy shows few signs of needing more.  The US innovation engine is doing just fine. In fact, Roschelle et al. point out that Singapore sends delegations to the US to figure out what we’re doing right.

The part that most influenced my thinking was Roschelle et al.’s analysis of the STEM pipeline.  We imagine a pipeline where:

• We modernize curriculum and pedagogy in K-12 which results in better prepared students and greater interest in STEM disciplines;
• These students then achieve more in STEM and pursue undergraduate degrees;
• Graduates with STEM degrees become scientists and engineers in the labor and academic force;
• Which results in greater national economic development.

Roschelle et al. consider each phase of the pipeline:

• Yes, better K-12 curriculum does lead to better student achievement.  Teacher quality, however, may play an even larger role, and the distribution of high-quality teachers is uneven and inequitable.  There is far more research effort in curriculum than teacher professional development.  But even if you can improve all three of curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher quality, the results are surprisingly short lived because it’s a staged pathway, and the stages don’t communicate.  (I’m reminded of Alan’s quote, “You can fix a clock, but you have to negotiate with a system.”)  ”This may be because credentials, not specific higher order abilities, get students into university, and once students are there professors expect only traditional textbook learning (and correspondingly do not leverage what students have learned from more progressive curricula).”  (Italics were in original.)  In other words: If you were in some terrific new 4th grade curriculum where you learned to do inquiry-based learning, that might raise your test scores that year, but you’ll get into college based on your SAT and ACT scores, and your university prof won’t assume you know how to do inquiry-based learning.
• This next part was quite surprising to me: Increasing student interest and achievement doesn’t change undergraduate STEM enrollment.  ”Lowell and Salzman (2007) found that although American high school students’ exposure to math and science has increased and their standardized test scores have increased over time, their interest in pursuing science and engineering majors has been stable…In other words, even with 20 years of steady improvements at the K-12 level, no increase occurred in the percentage of university students interested in majoring in STEM fields.” (p. 23)  Despite our concerns about low scores, the references in Roschelle et al. say that the slope is upward. My guess is that improving interest and achievement is necessary, but not sufficient for undergraduate STEM enrollment.  If students don’t understand science and they hate it, they won’t major in it.  But loving STEM or computing doesn’t mean you want a career in it.  Bigger factors preventing greater undergraduate STEM degree production are poor quality college STEM education (“e.g., large, lecture-based, fast-paced classes”) and poor access to high school “gatekeeper” courses.  ”Finishing a course beyond Algebra II, such as trigonometry or calculus, in high school more than doubled the probability that college-enrolled students would obtain their bachelor’s degree (Adelman, 1999.)”  Getting more of those courses available involves (in part) fixing the problem of access to high-quality teachers.
• Surprisingly many students who graduate with STEM degrees don’t stick with STEM jobs.  Within 4 years, 27% of science and engineering bachelors have moved on to unrelated jobs, and the percentage increases each year.

Overall, though, Roschelle et al. tell a story in favor of the importance of computing education research.  Being able to use computing “in sense making” and for “information literacy” are on several education and economics groups’ lists of 21st century skills.  Learning how to measure and improve those skills are among the top recommendations of their paper.  And while the pipeline is not nearly as connected as we might like, it’s possible to have long term effects.  For example, the Perry Preschool Program had dramatic effects on its participant, through Age 27.

Richard Hake had a related post recently.  Why do we want to educate children and improve education overall?  Hake argues with Roschelle et al. that competitiveness is not an important enough driver, and maybe there are even bigger issues than economics that we should be aiming toward.

Ravitch wrote: “. . . .the nation forgot that education has a greater purpose than preparing our children to compete in the global economy.” I agree with Coles and Ravitch that “global competitiveness” should not be the main driver of education reform. In a discussion list post “Is the ‘Skills Slowdown’ the Biggest Issue Facing the Nation?” at <http://bit.ly/9kIHAW>, I countered David Brooks’ claim <http://nyti.ms/LfJp1K> that it was, arguing the ”Threat to Life on Planet Earth” was the biggest issue facing the nation. Likewise, I think the “Threat to Life on Planet Earth” and NOT “global competitiveness” should be the main driver of education reform.

via LISTSERV 16.0 – AERA-L Archives.

I learned from reading the Roschelle et al. paper that it is hard for computing education research to impact the overall economy, but as Hake is pointing out, too — there are more important goals for us.  People need computing skills in the 21st century. Our skills can help the individuals at the bottom half of the economy become more marketable and raise their economic status (and those of their children), but more importantly, computing skills can make them better citizens in a democracy (e.g., maybe as critical thinkers, or as people who know how to explore and test claims in the newspaper and made by politicians).  We do need more and better curriculum, because that does have an achievement impact, but we have a greater need to produce more and better teachers.

Why high-income students do better: It’s not the velocity but the acceleration

Low-income students and schools are getting better, according to this study.  They’re just getting better so much more slowly than the wealthy students and schools.  Both are getting better incrementally (both moving in the right direction), but each increment is bigger for the rich (acceleration favors the rich).

We heard something similar from Michael Lach last week.  The NSF CE21 program organized a workshop for all the CS10K efforts focused on teacher professional development.  It was led by Iris Weiss who runs one of the largest education research evaluation companies.  Michael was one of our invited speakers, on the issue of scaling.  Michael has been involved in Chicago Public Schools for years, and just recently from a stint at the Department of Education.  He told us about his efforts to improve reading, math, and science scores through a focus on teacher professional development.  It really worked, for both the K-8 and high school levels.  Both high-SES (socioeconomic status) and low-SES students improved compared to control groups.  But the gap didn’t get smaller.

Despite public policy and institutional efforts such as need-blind financial aid and no-loan policies designed to attract and enroll more low-income students, such students are still more likely to wind up at a community college or noncompetitive four-year institution than at an elite university, whether a member of the Ivy League or a state flagship.The study, “Running in Place: Low-Income Students and the Dynamics of Higher Education Stratification,” will be published next month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, but an abstract is already available on the journal’s website.“I think [selective colleges] very much want to bring in students who are low-income, for the most part,” said Michael N. Bastedo, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of higher education at the University of Michigan. “The problem is, over time, the distance between academic credentials for wealthy students and low-income students is getting longer and longer…. They’re no longer seen as competitive, and that’s despite the fact that low-income students are rising in their own academic achievement.”

via News: Running in Place – Inside Higher Ed.

Do free and open learning technologies help the rich more than the poor?

I looked up Justin Reich based on Betsy DiSalvo’s comment last week.  Justin argues that the affluent benefit more from free and open learning technologies (like WikiSpaces) than do lower socioeconomic class students, so free and open learning technologies actually widen the gap, more than shrink it.  His video op-ed, linked below, makes this case with data based on use of WikiSpaces, showing that lower socioeconomic schools have less capacity to pick up and use these technologies.

But what to do?  I liked both of the initiatives that Justin mentions, but I was disappointed that both of them are outside school.  His study is on school use, but his recommendations are for out-of-school use.  Is there nothing we can do in poorer schools to make things better?

Weekend newspaper coverage on computing for all, especially kids

The NYTimes had an article on Saturday on “Computer Science for the Rest of Us” which was all about broad introductory computing classes at the college level.  I exchanged email with the author before the column came out, pointing out several sources and mentioning Media Computation. Randy felt that Georgia Tech’s experience with computing for everyone was less compelling, because Georgia Tech is an “engineering school.”  He said that he was more interested in programs that cater to humanities majors — which is what MediaComp is, because we developed it to reach Liberal Arts, Architecture, and Management majors.

More interesting is the whole section of The Guardian focused on computing education. I learned about it from Nick Falkner’s post on CS as a fundamental 21st century skill, and then from other readers who forwarded me the link — thanks!  I was most impressed by the open letter to the UK Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, “A manifesto for teaching computer science in the 21st century.”  John Naughton really gets why CS in K-12 matters, and understands (better than most programmers) that teaching computing is not about threatening the programmer elites.

[T]hey are not the most important justification, which is that in a world shaped and dependent on networking technology, an understanding of computing is essential for informed citizenship.

3. We believe every child should have the opportunity to learn computer science, from primary school up to and including further education. We teach elementary physics to every child, not primarily to train physicists but because each of them lives in a world governed by physical systems. In the same way, every child should learn some computer science from an early age because they live in a world in which computation is ubiquitous. A crucial minority will go on to become the engineers and entrepreneurs who drive the digital economy, so there is a complementary economic motivation for transforming the curriculum.

 

“Which College Majors Screw Over Women the Least?” Yay for IT!

A rather provocative title from the Jezebel site leads to some interesting statistics.  If you follow the link to the NYTimes site, you find that CS still has men paid 2% more than women.  IT is the winner, where women make more than men. What I find it interesting that few women choose IT for a career, despite the obvious economic advantages: Lots of jobs, high-paying jobs, and jobs where women get paid better than men.  That suggests that decision away from IT is not an economic one — there are other factors at play.

According to the Times’ Catherine Rampell, it looks like a woman’s choice of college major may determine her future income equality. Rampell analyzed information provided by salary data-collecting company PayScale and found that a surprising number of majors actually eliminate much of the discrepancy between male and female pay. Women who majored in Mechanical Engineering or Management Information Systems, for example, earn identical salaries to their male counterparts, even when controlled for demographic differences. Women who studied Electrical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Communications, English, Sociology, Graphic Design, or Psychology earn only 1% less than men doing the same job. And women who studied Information Technology in undergrad and didn’t go to grad school actually outearn similarly educated men by 1%.

via Which College Majors Screw Over Women the Least?.

Claim: Average Taxpayers Are Heavily Supporting Elite Colleges

I don’t understand the claim of this study, which makes it hard for me to believe it.  I can sort of see how it’s possible that average taxpayers are providing subsidies to elite public schools.  While the state contribution to elite state universities are decreasing, because the elites are so much more expensive, they probably still take a larger part of state taxpayer dollars than other institutions in the state.  But elite private schools?  How?  Through Pell Grants and other federal programs?  How can that be more than the non-profits and middles?

An October study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) entitled “Cheap for Whom?” showed one way that  the university system is rigged in favor of the rich. It said:  “Average taxpayers provide more in subsidies to elite public and private schools than to the less competitive schools where their own children are likely being educated…. Among not-for-profit institutions, the amount of taxpayer subsidies hovers between $1,000 and $2,000 per student per year until we turn to the most selective institutions . . . Among these already well-endowed institutions, the taxpayer subsidy jumps substantially to more than $13,000 per student per year.”

via Average Taxpayers Are Heavily Supporting Elite Colleges.