Requiring isn’t the same as Improving

Here at Georgia Tech, all students are required to take introductory computer science.  For the first four years of that policy, we taught the same (single) intro course that we ever did.  Our results are similar to what Chicago is finding with its new science requirement.

A policy change that made college-preparatory courses the default high school curriculum in the Chicago public schools increased the number of science courses that students took and passed. But it also kept some students from taking higher-level science courses and did not increase the college-going rate, according to a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

via Education Week: Effect of Chicago’s Tougher Science Policy Mixed.

I particularly liked this quote — taking more of the same thing just leads to more classes in which students do badly:

“Before the policy, most students received C’s and D’s in their classes,” he said. “If they weren’t being successful with one or two years of science, why would we think they would be successful with three years of science, if we don’t pay attention to getting the students engaged?”

SIGCSE Preview: Mike Hewner and Game Industry Needs

Next week is SIGCSE 2010, so the sound of scampering feet, practice talks, and impending panic permeates our group here at Georgia Tech.  We have something in seven sessions this year.  Tom Cortina, Program Co-Chair this year and Conference Co-Chair next year, told me how much trouble we’re causing him, to not have us overlap anywhere.  (Barb already discovered that she was double-booked, but got it resolved.)

I thought I’d spend some of my blog posts this week giving previews of talks and sessions that Georgia Tech folk are involved in.  I try to be cautious in talking about student work before it gets published.  This seems like fair pickings, to talk about their cool work (and to drum up more of an audience!).

Mike Hewner is presenting Friday on “What Game Developers look for in a New Graduate: Interviews and Surveys at One Game Company.”  Mike isn’t actually doing his dissertation on game development.  Mike really wants to be a computer science teacher at the post-secondary level.  He realized that many students coming into College today want to be game developers.  So, last summer, he took an internship at a game company, so that he could tell students honestly that he had first-hand experience as a game developer.  While he was there, he did the research for this paper.

There are various efforts going on to define what is the core of CS through efforts like concept inventories, e.g., asking teachers what’s important or hard.  Mike asked a much more focused question, “For what do game developers get hired?” Know what gets you a job as a game developer?  Rather than ask teachers, he asked the people who hire game developers.  He used a variant of a Delphi method, to develop an initial list of needs, then to get his respondents to respond to each other and rank the whole list.

In his dissertation work, Mike is actually interested in a much broader question.  We know that students are showing less interest in computing careers.  Mike is using social psychology to ask the question: How do students become affiliated with computing as a career choice, and how can we influence that affiliation?  He’s got a project going on right now that responds in some sense to Maureen Biggers’ paper about Stayers vs. Leavers.  Maureen found that people who stayed in computing tended to see it as a broad field, while those who left thought it was just about programming.  Mike is trying to see if he can get high school students to broaden their definition of computing, using concept maps to measure that breadth.  That’s probably more than I should say about unpublished (actually, ongoing and unfinished!) work.  If you want to know more, find Mike at SIGCSE next week.

“Constant Vigilance!”: Working for Computing Education in Georgia

It’s been a rough week for “Georgia Computes!” and our work to promote computing education in Georgia.

One of the things that Barb Ericson (a co-PI on our project, the Director of CS Outreach for the College of Computing, my co-author, and my wife) helped establish is an endorsement (a kind of certification) in computer science for high school teachers. Last week, Barb got bad news from one of the teachers she works with. The Georgia Professional Standards Commission website had been updated to explain that the endorsement does not allow a high school teacher to teach computer science classes, but to “run computer labs.”  Barb talked to her contacts at Georgia PSC all this week, trying to get that corrected.  Finally, they agreed that it was a mistake, and it would get fixed.  No word on how the erroneous information got posted.

Then, two days ago, Barb got word from one of her high school teachers that the Georgia Department of Education had announced that AP Computer Science would no longer count towards high school graduation requirements.  Until last month, Georgia and Texas were the only two states in the US who let students use AP CS credit towards graduation, a significant incentive to take AP CS.  Both Barb and I have working with our contacts in all the various organizations the last two days trying to find out what happened.

Here’s the story, best as we can tell so-far.  Georgia has one public University System, with one Board of Regents.  The Board of Regents recently refined their standards for admission to the system, and worked with the Georgia Department of Education to make sure that what GaDoE required for graduation met what the BoR was requiring for admission.  One of the particular areas of focus was the Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education (CTAE) Division classes.  There was some serious concern in both the BoR and GaDoE that some of those classes shouldn’t really count as a “Science” course for the “fourth science class requirement” of graduation and admissions.  For better or worse, computer science in Georgia is part of CTAE.  It was CTAE that announced that AP CS would no longer count towards meeting that requirement.

Now, the Board of Regents is telling us that AP CS was never even brought up for review.  They are willing to review it, and they are investigating this next week.  We just heard today from a contact with the Science Committee of the Georgia Dept of Ed that “Computer Science is only a ‘science’ in that the word is in its name.”  The Department of Education may not have brought AP CS up for review, because their Science Committee didn’t want it to count as a science towards graduation.  We’ll learn more this week, as the BoR checks to see if AP CS was on its review list, and then starts their own review of AP CS curricula to decide if it should count.

For right now, it doesn’t count.  As of October 1, only Texas counts any computer science towards high school graduation requirements.  Georgia has backslid.

I keep thinking about Mad Eye Moody in the Harry Potter series of books by J.K. Rowling.  “Vigilance! Constant Vigilance!” he would demand of all those fighting against the Dark Wizards. It feels like that’s what we have to do in “Georgia Computes!” to make sure that computing education keeps progressing, and doesn’t backslide.  Fortunately, Barb has her own “Order of the Phoenix,” in her network of teachers who let her know of any sign of trouble.  It really shouldn’t be this hard, should it?