Archive for December, 2012
Barbara’s Annual AP CS Analysis for #CSEdWeek: 2012 was A Great Year!
Barbara Ericson has completed her annual analysis of AP CS Level A exam results. It was a banner year: The greatest number of test-takers ever, and well over the 20K “break-even” point (when the College Board stops losing money on giving an AP exam). Barbara broke it down by state (for states we’re particularly focusing on in ECEP), and by population of each state. Maryland does the best, in terms of test-takers per million people. Georgia ties with California for “test-taking density.”
Nationally 24,782 people took the AP CS A exam in 2012. This was a 14.7% increase from the previous year. The number of teachers who passed the audit was 2,103. The number of female exam takers was 4,635 which was up from 4,000 the year before. The number of Blacks was 1,014 up from 893 the previous year. The number of Hispanics was 1,919 up from 1,752 the previous year.
The percentage female was 18.7% which was lower than the previous year (18.9%) . The overall pass rate was 63.2%. The female pass rate was 56.4%. The white pass rate was 66.4%. The Asian pass rate was 69.9%. The Hispanic pass rate was 39.8%. The Hispanic male pass rate 43.6%. The Hispanic female pass rate was 26.6%. The Black pass rate was 27.3%. The Black male pass rate was 30.3%. The Black female pass rate was 18.25%.
In 2012 California passed Texas after years (since 2005) of Texas being the state with the most AP CS A exam takers. California had 3,920 and Texas had only 3,614.
Vint Cerf urges computer science to be included in EBacc
Interesting that the ACM is taking an active role in this education public policy issue. I’ve seen them do this in the US before, but not in the UK. It’s great to see!
Vint Cerf – the founding father of the internet – is backing the BCS’s call for computer science to be included in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc).
In 2015, the EBacc is set to replace the current GCSE examination system in five core subjects: English, maths, a science, a foreign language and one or other from history or geography. Students wishing to take subjects outside of the EBacc will continue to take GCSEs until new syllabuses for other subjects are constructed.
Cerf, the vice-president and chief internet evangelist for Google and a distinguished fellow of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, decided to air his views following the publication of The case for computer science as an option in the English Baccalaureate report from the BCS.
via Vint Cerf urges computer science to be included in EBacc.
Calling all US High School CS Teachers: Please give us your thoughts!
An important announcement from Baker Franke:
Right now a lot of important decisions are being made about the future of computing education in the United States. Sadly, though perhaps predictably, the people with the most vital information about the state of computing education – YOU THE TEACHERS – are potentially being left out of the process.
I’m working with the Center for Elementary Math and Science Education (CEMSE) here at the University of Chicago to ensure that REAL TEACHERS’ needs and voices will contribute to the information used to by these decision- and policy-makers.
There is a very brief (10 min or less), but very important survey I’d like you to fill out that will help convey what’s really going on in schools to those making decisions that will impact all of us in computing education. This information will be widely disseminated, it will be used, and it will matter. So please join me in collecting this information so that TEACHERS’ VOICES WILL BE HEARD.
All surveys must be completed by January 15, 2013.
As an incentive for your participation, we are giving away one $50 Amazon gift card to one lucky person every time 100 people complete the survey. So the earlier you complete the survey, and the more computing teacher friends you pass this along to, the more chances you have to win!
Survey Link: http://tinyurl.com/CEMSETeacherSurvey
COMPLETE IT NOW!
Thanks much. Yours in solidarity,
Baker Franke
Computer Science Teacher
University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
Center for Elementary Math and Science Education
Happy #CSEdWeek! Join the Twitter Conversation Tuesday!
I’m participating in this — come join the CSEdWeek “tweet-up” on Tuesday at 6 pm EST.
On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 6PM ET CSEdWeek is hosting a 45-minute national conversation on the critical issue of K-12 Computer Science education via Twitter.A national panel of thought leaders in the field will be tweeting with the hashtag #CSEdWeek, driving conversation around important issues and answering questions. We’d like to invite you and your organization to participate in this Twitter discussion, using your official organizational and personal Twitter handles, highlighting your specific knowledge on the nuances within this space and responding to any questions that might arise within your area of expertise.Participants will include technical professionals, industry thought leaders, faculty, K12 educators, students and more! Computer science fuels the future—help us fuel the conversation.
Comparing MOOCs and books
Massive on-line courses are more comparable to books than face-to-face classes, an issue raised and discussed in the comments to the recent blog post about Larry Cuban and described pointedly in a recent comment by Mark Urban-Lurain on this blog. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education commentary makes a similar claim:
A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher. Every age has its autodidacts, gifted people able to teach themselves with only their books. Woe unto us if we require all citizens to manifest that ability.
I just came back from a visit to Stanford where John Mitchell, vice-provost for on-line education at Stanford, explained to me the value of MOOCs over textbooks. Textbooks don’t provide much of a feedback mechanism to the author — you write the book, and you get feedback from your class and maybe a few teachers who adopt your book and provide you comments. But MOOCs let you try out ideas at scale, even do A/B testing on how to present something, and get feedback for the next design iteration. I pointed out to him that that’s true, but only if you can separate out the signal from the noise. Which MOOC students do you really want to get feedback from? The 80% of “students” who are re-taking a course they’ve taken before? The 90% of enrollees who never planned to finish?
In the NYTimes piece linked below, I don’t agree with the claim that poor videos are the “trouble with online education.” In fact, it paints too broad a stroke — there are lots of things which are online education which aren’t video-based, massive on-line courses. But the basic claim is fair and reasonable and still interesting.
Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.
via The Trouble With Online Education – NYTimes.com.
Certainly, there are differences between MOOCs and books. I would predict that, in a comparison study, more people would learn more (meaning pre/post learning gain) from books than from MOOCs. Our current best-in-class MOOCs we have are less engaging than best-in-class books for most people. Whether or not people finish the books they buy, many people spend good money to purchase top-ranked books. MOOCs barely get 20% finishing the course (after the first homework), when they don’t charge anything at all. Sure, there’s not much of a carrot to finish a MOOC (e.g., no credit, no degree), but neither is there for a book. The challenge is how to build on-line courses that are better than books!
Pay gap, lack of role models to blame for ICT gender imbalance in Australia
It’s an interesting set of claims in Australia to explain the lack of women in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in this article. I’m wondering about the notion of “role model” and how it plays a role in this story. Do you think that young women see the senior management in ICT companies? Do high school or college students know what the gender split is in the companies that might employ them?
When we introduced Media Computation, I thought that it would play a role in recruitment. Over 50% of students in Liberal Arts, Architecture, and Business would withdraw or fail the required CS course before we created Media Computation. Now that we have a CS course that 85% of those students pass each semester, that should draw in more students, shouldn’t it? We looked, but never saw evidence of that. There’s just not much of a feedback mechanism from undergraduate back to high school.
I do believe that the lack of women in upper management can be a deterrent to other women. “Unlocking the Clubhouse” talked about the phenomenon of women entering CS classes, seeing no other women, and wondering, “Do I belong here?” I expect that the lack of women in ICT management sends a signal to other women, “People like you don’t belong.” But I wonder if that signal reaches all the way down to high school or college.
The pay gap between women and men in IT and the lack of senior female role models are the main reasons why young women are not taking up a career in ICT, according to Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA).
Speaking ahead of an address to the VMWare Women in IT event in Sydney today, EOWA director Helen Conway used the research from the 2012 Remuneration Survey conducted by the Australian Computer Society to show how serious an issue the gender pay gap is in the industry. She said the research found that men in ICT earn, on average, 9.8 per cent more than women, even though women entering the industry start on comparable or slightly higher salaries.
With not enough women entering the industry, Conway said this has resulted in a lack of senior role models for young women to look up to, which further contributes to the problem of young women not thinking of IT as a suitable career choice.
More Universities Should Teach Computer Science and Not be Shut Down
Following the announced restructuring of the University of Florida CS program and this classic quote about how Yale shouldn’t be in the business of teaching “trade skills” (meaning, applied software engineering), I’m going to argue that more (not all, but more) academic computer science programs should be shut down or reorganized.
via More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs | Jeffrey McManus.
That’s an interesting claim. Unfortunately, the argument isn’t very convincing..
1. Most undergraduates and professionals actually want to learn applied software engineering, not “computer science.” So? That’s not all that industry most wants to hire. That’s not what society most needs.
2. University undergraduates are not discriminating consumers of education. Agreed, which again gets back to why we would care (in Step #1) that that’s what undergraduates think that they want.
3. It should not be necessary for two universities located within commuting distance of each other to have the same academic department. I guess it depends on how large you can make the classrooms and how effective the teachers are at motivating large groups of students to reach completion. Part of the growth of universities has been spurred on by increased demand. I’m not sure how this statement fits into the overall argument.
4. Applied software engineering is a discipline that lends itself to being effectively taught online. Definitely an intriguing claim, but I’m not sure that I agree. Really good software engineering is a design activity, which is best learned in a reflective apprenticeship setting — the kind of high-bandwidth communication that we can’t do yet well on-line. Further, online learning is still hard to do with multiple modalities (yes, you can watch a video, but you can’t read the screen well; and the tools to provide audio narration for clearly-readable code are still developing), and there’s evidence to believe that multiple modalities are key to learning to read code well.
5. Most university computer courses simply aren’t that good if your goal is to get a job doing applied software engineering. I might be willing to agree here, but it’s not clear (a) that we should be teaching only applied software engineering in universities, (b) that students most need applied software engineering, and (c) that it’s not better for everyone (industry, society, students) to aim to teach CS better.
6. University academic departments in general should have limited charters and should be reorganized frequently. That’s another interesting claim, and one I might support, but still doesn’t seem connected to the argument that University CS departments should be shut down.
Computing is among the best-paying jobs for women, but that might not be enough
Information science and computer science are both in the top five best-paying jobs for women, says Forbes. Yet, the percentage of women in computing remains dismally in the low-teens percent at most schools. Why is that? Do women not know that computing pays well for them, or is that not a factor in their choice of majors?
It’s a complicated question of how one chooses a career. I ran another half marathon on Thanksgiving, and noticed the same observation in the results that I did when I ran the DisneyWorld half marathon in January: Women are the majority of the runners, but the men (on average) run faster. Ambition to be “the best” is not what’s motivating all those women to run. In Education, there’s the Eccles Model of Achievement-Related Choices that speaks to choice of major. Expectation of success is a primary factor (for the student’s definition of success), but just as large is the value that the student has for the choice, and that’s influence by a variety of factors, including affect and social milieu. High pay might not be one of the critical values for women in choosing careers.
Due to the continuing gender difference in pay, researchers at the CEW analyzed 171 undergraduate majors by how well they pay off for women. Perhaps not surprisingly, the top 10 best-paying college majors for women closely align with the most recent list of the best-paying jobs for women, with pharmacy reigning supreme. The list is also dominated by engineering and computer science majors, areas where men are highly concentrated.
How did math and science education grow out of math and science departments?
In the 18th and 19th centuries, mathematics became part of the core curriculum, and in the early 20th century, mathematics education started being taken seriously. The first Chair of mathematics education was created in 1893 — in a mathematics department.
I don’t know how science education research came to be seen as a standalone field. I know that the earliest Physics Education Researchers (like Lillian McDermott) started (and in Lillian’s case, remain) in Physics.
If you look at most Schools/Colleges/Departments of Education today, there are programs in science education, mathematics education, and sometimes even history or reading education. At what point did these fields break away from their original domain departments become established in Education? What was the development path? Clearly, becoming part of the core curriculum is key. Then it’s important to teach teachers about it.
I honestly don’t know the answer, and I’m hoping that readers here might be able to lend some light. What is the developmental path such that computing education is becomes entrenched, part of what we teach teachers about, and something that grows beyond computer science departments?
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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