SIGCSE 2020: Papers freely available, AP CSA over AP CSP for diversifying computing, and a tour of computing ed research in one hour

My Blog@CACM post for this month was about my first stop on my tour of SIGCSE 2020 papers (see link here). While the SIGCSE 2020 conference was cancelled, the papers are freely available now through the end of June — see all the proceedings here. I’ve started going through the proceedings myself. The obvious place to start such a tour is with the award-winning papers. My Blog@CACM post is on the paper from An Nguyen and Colleen M. Lewis of Harvey Mudd College on the negative impact of competitive enrollment policies (having students enroll to get into CS, or requiring a higher-than-just-passing GPA to get into the computing major) on students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and perceptions of the department.

I said that this was the first stop on my tour, but that’s not really true. I’d already looked up the paper Does AP CS Principles Broaden Participation in Computing?: An Analysis of APCSA and APCSP Participants (see link here), because I’d heard about it from co-author Joanna Goode. I was eager to see the result. They show that AP CS Principles is effectively recruiting much more diverse students than the AP CS A course (which is mostly focused on Java programming). But, AP CS A students end up with more confidence in computing and much more interest in computing majors and tech careers. Maybe CSA students had more interest to begin with — there is likely some selection bias here. This result reminds me of the Weston et al result (see blog post here) showing that the female high school students they studied continued on to tech and computing majors and careers if they had programming classes.

I’ve been reading The Model of Domain Learning: Understanding the Development of Expertise (see Amazon link) which offers one explanation of what’s going on here. Pat Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning points out that domain knowledge is necessary to have sustained interest in a domain. You can draw students in with situational interest (having activities that are exciting and engage novices), but you only get sustained interest if they also learn enough about the domain. Maybe AP CSP has more situational interest, but doesn’t provide enough of the domain knowledge (like programming) that leads to continued success in computing.

In my SIGCSE 2020 Preview blog post (posted just two days before the conference was posted), I mentioned the cool session that Colleen Lewis was organizing where she was going to get 25 authors to present the entire 700+ page Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research in 75 minutes. Unfortunately, that display of organizational magic didn’t occur. However, in a demonstration of approximately the same level of organizational magic, Colleen got the authors to submit videos, and she compiled a 55 minute version (which is still shorter than reading the entire tome) — see it on YouTube here.

There are lots of other great papers in the proceedings that I’m eager to get into. A couple that are high on my list:

• Dual-Modality Instruction and Learning: A Case Study in CS1 from Jeremiah Blanchard, Christina Gardner-McCune, and Lisa Anthony from University of Florida, which provides evidence that a blocks-based version of Java leads to more and deeper version on the same assessments as students learning with textual Java (see link here).
• Design Principles behind Beauty and Joy of Computing by Paul Goldenberg and others. I love design principles papers, because they explain why the authors and developers were doing what they were doing. I have been reading Paul since back in the Logo days. I’m eager to read his treatment of how BJC works (see link here).

Please share in the comments your favorite papers with links to them.