How do we make high school CS classes more “real”?

I started working on a reply to Alan Kay’s comment on my previous blog post, and as it got longer with more links, I realized I should just use blog-owner’s prerogative and make a new post.  The issue we were discussing was how to make the case that the AP CS should count as a course that fulfills the “science” requirement in Georgia.  I commented:

Barb and I were just talking last night about the issue you raised, that the AP CS curriculum doesn’t look like a science. In the argument that I offered to the GaDOE, Computer Science classes have a lot of science practices (even if the content is not easily recognized as science by a traditional scientist), such as developing hypotheses, experimentation, and analysis of results. However, most CS curricula (including AP CS) do not make those connections between debugging and the scientific method explicitly.

Alan replied that he’d like to see more “real science” in these classes.

While pretty much agreeing with your comments, I think the real issue is a much deeper epistemological one — and is a problem not just in computer “science” but in the teaching of most high school and many college “real sciences” which have deep models as the representations for their theories (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology).

In the “real deal” it’s not so much about “hypotheses, experiments, analysis” (the standard elementary school characterization of science) as it is about the goodness and depth of the mapping between the observations and the model (in the standard characterization of science, this could be thought of as real thresholds in what “analysis” actually should mean).

So, how do we make that happen?  How do we get the “real deal” into high school classes?

My suggestion is that this doesn’t happen by making the argument for “real” classes at the state level.  The job of the Georgia Department of Education Science Committee is, explicitly,  to ask if any individual class “aligns with the GPS science standards, and/or the national science standards.” State standards are not re-written all that often, and Georgia just rewrote theirs.  Take a look at a given set of science standards, like those for high school Chemistry.  There you see terms like “hypotheses, experiments, analysis.”  Terms like “modeling” and “mapping” don’t appear at all.

How do we get a modeling and mapping focus in these classes?  Georgia (probably like most states) takes their lead from national authorities, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science standards “Science for All Americans.”  Take a look at what AAAS says about how to teach science — it’s a pretty close match to what Georgia has in their standards.  Nothing about modeling or mapping there, either.

The suggestion that I’m making is, if you want to get science classes to change, to make them more “real,” get the National Academies, or AAAS, or similar respected body to issue a report.  Larry Snyder’s NRC report on “Information FITness” gets cited a lot when discussing what students need to know about computer science.  It’s hard to make the case at the State level, because people within the State look outside the State for evidence.  These kinds of national reports make a difference.

Now, how do you get CS classes to be more “real”?  One way is by changing the Advanced Placement class, as NSF is trying to do.  Another way might be to use the same strategy as for Science — get the recognized authorities to come out with a statement, a report that says, “Here’s what real Computing Education should look like.”

My own opinion is that radical change is not going to come out of the ACM/IEEE curriculum standards process.  I was part of the committee for the CS 2008 standards update.  It is hard to get a dramatic and powerful statement for change out of that process.  We’re in a challenging stage in our field — we’ve got lots of ideas, and few measures for determining which is better than the other.

There were easily a half dozen new approaches to teaching CS that were vying to get a mention (better yet, a recommendation) in the new curricular volume.   How do you decide?  We have no reliable and valid measures of computing knowledge that cross approaches and languages.  We as a field can’t even agree on the learning objectives.  We on the committee tried to come up with some measure about usage and peer-review, but even that was insufficient.  If three schools do kinda the same thing and the approach got mentioned in a software engineering conference article, does that count?  Maybe it should — do we have a better standard? To list everything is no recommendation or guidance at all.  One of the criticisms of CC2001 was that it recommended a half dozen approaches for CS1 already.  I pushed to get some of those off the list — don’t we have evidence that some of these aren’t really all that effective?  The push back was similar.  “How do we really know that these don’t work?” and “We know friends who use those approaches.  How can we say in this volume that they don’t work?”  The result is that the volume reflects the least common denominator curriculum, which is useful for describing current accepted best practice, but it’s not a forward-looking statement of what should be.

Seymour Papert in his book The Children’s Machine argued that part of what happened to Logo was school.  School has a process of compartmentalizing and turning new ideas into standard curricula.  We can argue that this is wrong (and Seymour did in his book), but it is the reality.  I am describing here the process (as I understand it now, incomplete as that understanding is) of how one achieves curricular change at the secondary level — you show how you can meet the existing standards, or you push to get the standards re-written, with the most leverage coming from authoritative statements at the national level.  It’s hard work, but as Seymour points out, that’s how the system keeps from thrashing.  The system is designed to make it hard to change the system.

Moving the Needle

I’m teaching Educational Technology this semester (joint undergraduate and graduate section). This last week, we read two chapters from Noss and Hoyle’s 1996 Windows on mathematical meanings: Learning cultures and computers which describe what happened to Logo: From Mindstorms, to the backlash against “curriculum-free” education, to the Pea and Kurland papers. I hadn’t realized until I re-read those chapters and visited the LCSI website just how negative the term “Logo” had become. LCSI, the company Seymour Papert co-founded to create Logo implementations, is now a “global leader in constructivist educational technology” and sells “Microworlds.”  The word “Logo” only appears in the footer of the web page, to explain the “L” in “LCSI.”

Since the session topic was the challenge of educational reform, I also told the story of Media Computation and my recent blog post about teachers unadopting (or maybe “differently adapting”?) aspects of Media Computation. After class, one of the students approached me to ask, “If educational reform is so hard to achieve, why do you do it?” It was a great question that took me a couple days to answer, by realizing that there’s a faulty base assumption behind the question.

Logo is not a failure. It’s an enormous success.  There isn’t an educational technology project in the world that hasn’t been influenced in some way by Seymour and Logo. However Noss and Hoyle are completely correct — Seymour’s vision has not been realized.

There are two ways to think about the purpose of educational research. The first is all-or-nothing — you put together a complete intervention, think through as many aspects of the educational ecosystem that you can, and aim for other classrooms to act just as you envision.  If you’re building a reform intervention, you have to aim for this. Teachers have hard jobs, and classrooms are complicated places. Few would try Media Computation if we didn’t have software and textbooks and syllabi and Powerpoint slides.  The second purpose is moving-the-needle, and that’s a much more important goal.

Education is a worthy domain of research and investigation. The goal of educational researchers is to speak to the community, to add ideas to the conversation, and to change how the community thinks about a problem. To change the conversation, to change practice, and to influence people’s thinking about an educational problem — that’s moving-the-needle.  We publish to try to convince people about the value of our all-or-nothing vision, but our success is about moving-the-needle.

It’s damn hard to hear about teachers I respect giving up on some of the ideas that I hold dear, that I am convinced are better practice and for which we have empirical support. As a member of the research community, I will continue to argue for some of those ideas. (To the faculty who are giving up on having students saving their picture artifacts, in favor of focusing on the code: Think again about what the words “media” and “communication” mean!)  On the other hand, I take pride in evidence that our work is moving the needle.

This week, I spent some time visiting the MediaScheme website at Grinnell. Sam Rebelsky, Janet Davis, and colleagues completely buy into Media Computation and the value for their students. They just won’t give up on Scheme. They are creating their own libraries (to control GIMP from Scheme), writing their own textbook, and even creating their own IDE in order to do Media Computation in Scheme.  From an all-or-nothing perspective, this is a complete rejection of the libraries, textbooks, and IDE that we have created.  From a moving-the-needle perspective, I am completely delighted and flattered that they are making such effort around an idea that we could contribute to the conversation.

So finally, I can answer the student’s question: We do it because we believe we have a vision for improving practice.  We measure to convince others, and if we’re honest, to convince ourselves (or accept that we are wrong). But others are going to take our ideas, agree with some and disagree with others, and adopt what they see are the best ideas and adapt the rest.  Something new will result, hopefully better. It’s not about all-or-nothing. The goal is to be part of that struggle to figure out the best practice, to contribute to the structure of tomorrow’s classrooms and schools.  It’s all about moving the needle.

Education is to Social Work, as Civil Engineering is to Chemical Engineering

I’m listening to Paul Romer’s Seminar about Long Term Thinking, and got to thinking about the SALT podcasts and TED talks.  These really are remarkable educational opportunities — really smart people, who are also really good at communicating their ideas to a lay audience.  These are not necessarily front-line scientists.  Michael Pollan and Malcolm Gladwell, for example, are both journalists who focus on taking important ideas from science (and economics and…) and making them accessible.  Why is that uncommon? We have relatively few people who do this kind of thing, as opposed to all scientists or even all educators.  Is it because that combination of talents is so rare, or because there is little market, interest, or demand for it?

Seymour Papert once argued that educational curricula should be evaluated like art — don’t try to identify the best, but instead argue about how well this example expresses something, or how accessible another one is, or how another one leaves people thinking and talking for years later.  Compare curricula for how they reach and engage people, not for a measurable, numeric bottom line.  Wouldn’t it be great to have so many compelling CS1 curricula that we could have a CS1 “art gallery” and compare them along the lines Seymour described?

Let’s imagine that we wanted to have more education that was engaging, compelling, and explained things to people.  We’d have to re-organize how we teach and structure education.  In fact, that would go against the basic structuring mechanisms of universities.

When I was at the University of Michigan, there was a lot of excitement about the proposed increased connections between the School of Education and the School of Social Work.  At some places, like Northwestern University, these are housed in the same schools.  That makes sense because the goals of Social Work are very similar to the goals of Education — improved human development, meeting human potential, individual self-reliance, and so on.

However, if we grouped scholars in terms of methods, we would structure universities very differently.  I’ve always found it odd that Physics and Mechanical Engineering are in separate schools/colleges at most Universities, and the same with Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.  Aren’t these really the same things, relying on the same theories, doing similar experiments?  Instead, we group by outcomes.  Civil, Chemical, and Mechanical Engineering are all about applying science to solve problems for people, at a large scale (by creating bridges and buildings, chemical plants, manufacturing capacity).  Never mind that what I see faculty in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering doing much more similar things than faculty in Civil Engineering and Chemical Engineering.

If we did group by methods rather than outcomes, what disciplines would be the natural collaborators for Education?  What disciplines would lead us to think about how we do things, so that we could create the kind of curriculum-as-art that Seymour described?

• Journalism, which also cares about methods for finding “truth,” for conveying that to people in ways that are understandable and compelling, and for structuring the story so that the punchline is up front, and the greater detail is at the end.
• Theater, because lecture is a kind of performance. Experimental Theater does a better job of getting the audience interacting with the performance than do most lectures!
• Medicine, which is (much more than Education) about meeting individual needs and figuring out how to tailor broad approaches to health for the individual’s particular combination of strengths and illnesses.
• Film and Television Studies, which know a lot about using multiple media for creating a compelling story.  Everyone who does On-Line/Distance Education should take a Film Class, to figure out how you package a compelling story/experience for others whom you never see.
• Theme Park Designers (yeah, I know it’s not an academic discipline, but maybe it should be).  I’m a big Disney Imagineering fan.  Imagineers know how to draw you into the ride with the prestory, setting expectations and explaining the context, and then giving you an experience that you talk about and remember later.
• Economics, because in the end, most Educational decisions are economic ones.  We know how to get two-sigma improvements in learning — give everyone a personal tutor.  That’s too expensive to do at scale.  Everything else we do is a step down from that, and if we knew how economists think about these trade-offs, it might help us in Education recognize our trade-offs and where we’re making them.
• Psychology, because Education is just Psychology Engineering.  If in a methods-oriented University we lump Chemistry and Chemical Engineering together, we certainly should put the Psychologists and the Education faculty in the same building.

Okay, I’ll get back to my Faculty Summit talk preparation now, but I’m thinking about how the quality of education should be as much about the student’s experience as about the student’s performance on the test.