Let’s program in social studies classes: NSF funding for our work in task-specific programming languages

If we want all students to learn computer science (CS for All), we have to go to where the students are. Unfortunately, that’s not computer science class. In most US states, less than 5% of high school students take a course in computer science.

Programming is applicable and useful in many domains today, so one answer is to use programming in science, mathematics, social studies, and other non-CS classes. We take programming to where the students are, and hope to increase their interest and knowledge about CS. I love that idea and have been working towards that goal for the last four years. But it’s a hard sell. I told the story in 2018 (see post here) about how the mathematics teachers rejected our pre-calculus course that integrated computing. How do we help non-CS teachers to see value in computing integrated into their classes?

That’s the question Tammy Shreiner at Grand Valley State and I get three years to explore, thanks to a new grant from the US National Science Foundation in the research strand of the “CS for All” Program. Tammy teaches a course on “Data Literacy for Social Studies Teachers” at GVSU, and she (with her colleague Bradford Dykes) have been building an open educational resource (OER) to support data literacy education in social studies classes. We have been working with her to build usable and useful data visualization tools for her curriculum. Through the grant, we’re going to follow her students for three years: From taking her pre-service class, out into their field experiences, and then into their first classes. At each stage, we’re going to offer mentoring and workshops to encourage teachers to use the things we’ve showed them. In addition, we’ll work on assessments to see if students are really developing skills and positive attitudes about data literacy and programming.

Just a quick glimpse into the possibilities here. AP CS Principles exam-takers are now about 25% female. AP US History is 56% female exam takers. There are fives times as many Black AP US History exam-takers as AP CSP exam-takers. It’s a factor of 14 for Hispanic students. Everyone takes history. Programming activities in a history class reach a far more diverse audience.

I have learned so much in the last couple of years about what prevents teachers from adopting curriculum and technology — it’s way more complicated than just including it in their pre-service classes. Context swamps pre-service teaching. The school the teacher goes to influences what they adopt more than what they learned pre-service. I’ve known Anne Ottenbreit-Leftwich for years for her work in growing CS education in Indiana, but just didn’t realize that she is an expert on technology adoption by teachers — I draw on her papers often now.

Here’s one early thread of this story. Bahare Naimipour, an EER PhD student working with me, is publishing a paper at FIE next month about our early participatory design sessions with pre-service social studies teachers. The two tools that teachers found most interesting were CODAP and Vega-Lite. Vega-Lite is interesting here because it really is programming, but it’s a declarative language with a JSON syntax. The teachers told us that it was powerful, flexible — and “overwhelming.” How could we create a scaffolded path into Vega-Lite?

We’ve been developing a data visualization tool explicitly designed for history inquiry (you may remember seeing it back here). We always show at least two visualizations, because historical problems start from two accounts or two pieces of data that conflict.

As you save graphs in your inquiry to the right, you’re likely going to lose track of what’s what. Click on one of them.

This is a little declarative script, in a Vega-lite-inspired JSON syntax. It’s in a task-specific programming language, but this isn’t a program you write. This is a program the describes the visualization — code as a concise way of describing process.

We now have a second version where you can edit the code, or use the pull-down menus. These are linked representations. Changing the menu changes the code and updates the graph. Changing the code updates the menu and the graph. Now the code is also malleable. Is this enough to draw students and teachers into programming? Does it make Vega-Lite less overwhelming? Does it lead to greater awareness of what programming is, and greater self-efficacy about programming tasks?

We just had our first in-service teacher workshop with these tools in August. One teacher just gushed over them. “These are so great! How did I not know that they existed before?” That’s easy — they didn’t exist six months ago! We’re building things and putting them in front of teachers for feedback as quickly as we can, in a participatory design process. We make lots of mistakes, and we’re trying to document those, too. We’re about applying an HCI process to programming experience design — UX for PX.

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If you know a social studies teacher who would want to keep informed about our work and perhaps participate in our workshops, please have them sign up on our mailing list. Thank you!

Upcoming NSF Computing Education Workshops from Jeff Forbes

Jeff Forbes has just moved back to the National Science Foundation — great news!  He’s asked me to share information on a set of workshops that has just been funded, relevant to this list. People can sign up for the RPP and BPC Departmental Plans workshops now — the rest will have registration information upcoming.

BPC Plans Department Workshop

Award abstract: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1941413

CISE PIs are encouraged to include meaningful BPC plans in proposals submitted to a subset of CISE’s research programs. Nancy Amato (University of Illinois) is hosting a workshop about the development of departmental BPC plans. The workshop is schedule for Nov 13-15 at Univ of Illinois to bring together teams of 2-3 people/department. Register here.

Computing in Undergraduate Education Workshop

Three workshops to “spark a national dialogue about the role of computing in undergraduate education.” The workshops will likely be in Chicago, DC, and Denver. These workshops will hopefully inform the community and NSF as we develop programs like CUE.

See the award abstract for more information https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1944777

CS for All RPP Development workshops

http://nnerpp.rice.edu/csforall-workshops/

Career Workshops for Teaching Track Faculty

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1933380

Data Science for All: Designing the Successful Inclusion of Data Science in High School Computer Science

NY Hall of Science will hold a workshop exploring the potential for including authentic data science curricula and hands-on projects in high school CS courses.

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1922898

Women of Color in Tech

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1923245

Workshop – BP in STEM, Computer Science and Engineering through improved Financial Literacy

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939739

 

Do we want STEM education or do we want STEM learning?

I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’m working on using programming in teaching social sciences.  The goal is to teach STEM concepts (e.g., modeling, simulation, using graphical representations like charts, thinking about bias/skew and missing variables in big data, etc.), but in non-STEM subjects.  I argue that the “non-STEM subjects” part is key if you want diversity, if you want to draw in people who aren’t naturally going to show up in STEM classes.

I bounced this off an NSF program officer, and I got a pretty strong: “No.”  I’ll quote part of the response here.

While this is an intriguing idea, no, it would not be fundable in the XXX program as it does not involve the engagement of STEM faculty or their courses, assessments, or materials, or STEM majors.  (All of these are not necessary, but STEM is necessary, not just STEM learning.)

XXX is not just about improving or supporting STEM learning.  It is about improving STEM education.

There’s a distinction being drawn here between “STEM learning” and “STEM education.”  It’s an interesting and important distinction. I’m not at all saying that the officer is wrong.  This program officer is saying (paraphrasing), “It’s not just about learning STEM concepts. It’s about supporting the infrastructure and mechanisms through which we teach STEM.” (By the way, since this exchange, I’ve found other NSF officers in other programs that are more focused on STEM learning not just STEM education.)

That’s a fair concern. We do need STEM classes, curricula, assessments, and faculty. But if we really care about interdisciplinarity and broadening participation, we need to care about more than that.  We need to fund efforts to integrate STEM learning and use STEM thinking (e.g., Bacon’s Novum Organum) across the curriculum, to influence how we think about everything. We also need the infrastructure to support the institution of STEM education. The challenge is doing both.

There is an obvious connection to computing education.  We need more computer science teachers, curricula, tools, and classes. But we also need more students learning about computing, which might happen more inexpensively in mathematics, science, and social science classes. How do we prioritize?

Georgia Tech Launches Constellations Center Aimed at Equity in Computing

 

The Constellations Center was launched at a big event on December 11.  I was there, to hear Executive Director Charles Isbell host the night, which included a great conversation with Senior Director Kamau Bobb (formerly of NSF).

 

Constellations is going to play a significant role in keeping a focus on broadening participation in computing in Georgia, and to serve as a national leader in making sure that everyone gets access to computing education.

Georgia Tech’s College of Computing has launched the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing with the goal of democratizing computer science education. The mission of the new center is to ensure that all students—especially students of color, women, and others underserved in K-12 and post-secondary institutions—have access to quality computer science education, a fundamental life skill in the 21st century.

Constellations is dedicated to challenging and improving the national computer science (CS) educational ecosystem through the provision of curricular content, educational policy assessment, and development of strategic institutional partnerships. According to Senior Director Kamau Bobb, democratizing computing requires a “real reckoning with the race and class divisions of contemporary American life.”

See more here.

NSF Education Research Questions and Warnings for #CSforAll during #CSEdWeek

Joan Ferrini-Mundy spoke at our White House Symposium on State Implementation of CS for All (pictured above). Joan is the Assistant Director at NSF for the Education and Human Resources Directorate. She speaks for Education Research. She phrased her remarks as three research areas for the CS for All initiative, but I think that they could be reasonably interpreted as three sets of warnings. These are the things that could go wrong, that we ought to be paying attention to.

1. Graduation Requirements: Joan noted that many states are making CS “count” towards high school graduation requirements. She mentioned that we ought to consider the comments of organizations such as NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) and NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). She asked us to think about how we resolve these tensions, and to track what are the long term effects of these “counting” choices.

People in the room may not have been aware that NSTA had just (October 17) come out with a statement, “Computer Science Should Supplement, not Supplant Science Education.”

The NCTM’s statement (March 2015) is more friendly towards computer science, it’s still voiced as a concern:

Ensuring that students complete college- and career-readiness requirements in mathematics is essential. Although knowledge of computer science is also fundamental, a computer science course should be considered as a substitute for a mathematics course graduation requirement only if the substitution does not interfere with a student’s ability to complete core readiness requirements in mathematics. For example, in states requiring four years of mathematics courses for high school graduation, such a substitution would be unlikely to adversely affect readiness.

Both the NSTA and NCTM statements are really saying that you ought to have enough science and mathematics. If you only require a couple science or math courses, then you shouldn’t swap out CS for one of those. I think it’s a reasonable position, but Joan is suggesting that we ought to be checking. How much CS, science, and mathematics are high school students getting? Is it enough to be prepared for college and career? Do we need to re-think CS counting as science or mathematics?

2. Teacher Credentialing: Teacher credentials in computer science are a mishmash. Rarely is there a specific CS credential. Most often, teachers have a credential in business or other Career and Technical Education (CTE or CATE, depending on the state), and sometimes mathematics or science. Joan asked us, “How is that working?” Does the background matter? Which works best? It’s not an obvious choice. For example, some CS Ed researchers have pointed out that CTE teachers are often better at teaching diverse audiences than science or mathematics teachers, so CTE teachers might be better for broadening participation in computing. We ought to be checking.

3. The Mix of Curricular Issues: While STEM has a bunch of frameworks and standards to deal with, we know what they are. There’s NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) and the National Research Council Framework. There’s Common Core. There are the NCTM recommendations.

In Computer Science, everything is new and just developing. We just had the K-12 CS Framework released. There are ISTE Standards, and CSTA Standards, and individual state standards like in Massachusetts. Unlike science and mathematics, CS has almost no assessments for these standards. Joan explicitly asked, “What works where?” Are our frameworks and standards good? Who’s going to develop the assessments? What’s working, and under what conditions?

I’d say Joan is being a critical friend. She wants to see CS for All succeed, but she doesn’t want that to cost achievement in other areas of STEM. She wants us to think about the quality of CS education with the same critical eye that we apply to mathematics and science education.

Dr. Kamau Bobb Talks Research and Challenges in STEM Education

I’ve talked about Kamau Bobb’s work in this blog previously, when he wrote a depressing but deeply-insightful op-ed about the state of mathematics education in Atlanta public schools. He’s recently been interviewed in a three part series in Black Enterprise about his role as an NSF program officer.  The below quote is from Part II — I recommend the whole series.

The most significant challenge facing STEM education and the workforce is the capacity of the U.S. educational system to produce interested and qualified participants in the STEM enterprise. Here is where the racial and socio-economic challenges facing the nation are most glaring.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics National Report Card, there are some damning realities that significantly challenge STEM education and the STEM workforce. In 2015, only 33% of all eighth grade students in the U.S. were proficient or better in mathematics. Only 13% of black eighth graders and 19% of Hispanic eighth graders were proficient or better in mathematics, which is in contrast to 43% of white students and 61% of Asian students. For students who live in poverty and qualify for the National School Lunch Program, only 18% were proficient in eighth grade mathematics.

According to the College Board, only 16% of black students are college or career ready by the time they take the SAT in eleventh grade. For Hispanic students, 23% are ready. For Asian and white students, 61% and 53%, respectively, are ready for higher education or to take on meaningful work. This landscape is a problem.

Source: Dr. Kamau Bobb Talks Research and Challenges in STEM

Highlighting NSF STEM Education Showcase Videos

Last month, NSF hosted a STEM Education video showcase.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed and learned from these.  They’re only 3 minutes each, so it’s a brief investment in getting a sense of a project — and there are a lot of interesting projects here.  Here are some of my notes on what I found that was cool:

• You can find the CS education videos here, but there’s a lot more relevant stuff beyond that category, like the videos on integrating STEM and CS.
• Jill Denner’s video on the Digital NEST changed my mind about the role of informal education in broadening participation in computing.  I’ve worried that afterschool computer clubs and MakerSpaces are mostly for the privileged (as in this blog post).  Jill’s video was a compelling picture Hispanic/Latino/a youth in technology education.
• Learning scientists are increasingly exploring the role of embodiment in learning.  The project on integrating dance and CS was the first example that I’ve seen in how to do this in CS  — exciting work!
• I was pleased to see Sarah Wille’s work on providing computing education to students with learning disabilities.  It’s a really important area that we need for CS for All.  I have worked with Sarah on BASICS and didn’t know about this project.
• Celine Latulipe had a video on her lightweight teams that she uses in a Media Computation class (yay!) which is a short version of her SIGCSE 2016 paper.
• Sara Dunton did a great job organizing the ECEP video.

There are a lot more great videos, but I’ll stop there.  Highly recommended viewing!

Summarizing the Research on Designing Programming Languages to be Easier to Learn: NSF CS Ed Community Meeting

I’m at the NSF STEM+Computing and Broadening Participation in Computing Community Meeting.  At our ECEP meeting on Saturday, we heard from White House Champion of Change Jane Margolis.  She did a great job of getting our states to think about how to change their state plans to emphasize diversity and equity — more on that in a future blog post.

I moderated a panel yesterday on how to integrate computing education into schools of education.  Here’s the description of the session — again, more later on this.

Integrating Computing Education into Preservice Teacher Development Programs  

(Mark Guzdial (moderator), Leigh Ann DeLyser, Joanna Goode, Yasmin Kafai, Aman Yadav)

For computing education to become ubiquitous and sustainable in US K-12 schools, we need schools of Education to teach computing.

• ​What should we be teaching to preservice teachers?
• Where should we teach CS methods in preservice teacherdevelopment?
• How do we help schools of Ed to hire and sustain faculty who focus on computing education?

Panelists will talk about how CS Ed is being integrated into their preservice teacher development programs, and about alternative models for addressing these questions.

Yesterday, our other computing education research Champion of Change, Andreas Stefik presented a summary of the empirical evidence on how to design programming languages to make them easier to learn.  Follow the link below to get to the two-page PDF pamphlet he produced for his presentation — it’s dense with information and fascinating.

This pamphlet is designed to provide an overview of recent evidence on human factors evidence in programming language design. In some cases, our intent is to dispel myths. In others, it is to provide the result of research lines.

from Programming Languages and Learning by Andreas Stefik

NSF is hiring a permanent Program Director in CS Ed

Andy Bernat just told me about this job — I don’t know how I missed it earlier.  This is exciting! NSF is going to hire a permanent full-time CS education Program Director. The deadline is October 20, so get applications in soon.

A DUE Program Director can have a lot of influence in the field.  Andy was a rotating Program Director in DUE when he funded the Bootstrapping and Scaffolding projects which kicked off the rebirth of CS Ed in the United States, and led to the creation of the ICER conference.

This job opportunity announcement has been amended to extend the closing date to Tuesday, October 20, 2015.

The NSF is seeking qualified candidates for a permanent full-time Program Director position in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE), Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), Arlington, VA. The ideal candidate will have expertise in computer science, computer science undergraduate education, and knowledge of computer science education research. While candidates in all areas of computer science are encouraged to apply, there is particular interest in seeking candidates with expertise in the application of computing in interdisciplinary settings and/or data-intensive research.

Source: USAJOBS – Search Jobs

New solicitation for NSF STEM-C: Emphasis on K-12 and Integration with Other STEM Disciplines

The new NSF STEM-C solicitation is out: See http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/nsf15537/nsf15537.htm.

The introduction to the new solicitation is visionary and speaks of the power of computing in STEM and for all students.  Here’s just the first paragraph:

The STEM + Computing (STEM+C) Partnerships program seeks to advance a 21st century conceptualization of education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) that includes computing. The “+ Computing” notation emphasizes that computing is integral to the practice of all the other STEM disciplines. In this solicitation, computing refers to the whole set of fundamental concepts and skills that will allow students to creatively apply and adapt computation across a range of application domains, to “bend digital technology to one’s needs, purposes, and will.”

The focus of this solicitation is primarily on integration of computing with other STEM education disciplines, and secondarily, on computing education in K-12 (including teachers).  The prioritization is pretty clear from the budget limits:

The maximum total budget for Track 1: Integration of Computing in STEM Education awards is $2.5 million for Design and Development awards, $1.25 million for Exploratory Integration awards, and $250,000 for Field-Building Conferences and Workshops. The maximum total budget for Track 2: Computing Education Knowledge and Capacity Building awards is $600,000 for Research on Education and Broadening Participation awards and $1.0 million for CS 10K awards.

You can get up to $1.25M USD to explore integration of computing in STEM ($2.5M to design and develop), but at most $1M to put computing into schools and at most $600K to do research on computing education and broadening participation.  We might argue about the ratios, but in the end, both tracks and all the types of proposals have enough funding to do important work that needs to happen.

Computing ed researcher fired from NSF over questions about her role as 1980s activist

I’ve known Valerie Barr for years and believe that she was honest with the agents. I don’t believe that she lied about her involvement with a domestic terrorist organization that had “ties” (whatever that means) to two political activist organizations she belonged to.

I’m most shocked about the process. Valerie was dismissed on the basis of a report by a possibly biased agent — there are no transcripts or notes from the interview.  The OPM is prosecutor, judge, and jury — there is no defense. Doesn’t sound like due process to me.  It’s a loss to our community that a well-regarded researcher is forced out of NSF.

It’s a greater loss in that it will make it less likely that another “typical liberal college professor” (a quote from the below article) might offer to serve.

After again being asked if she had been a member of any organization that espoused violence, Barr was grilled for 4.5 hours about her knowledge of all three organizations and several individuals with ties to them, including the persons who tried to rob the Brink’s truck. Four people were found guilty of murder in that attack and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including Kathy Boudin, who was released in 2003 and is now an adjunct assistant professor of social work at Columbia University. “I found out about the Brink’s robbery by hearing it on the news, and just like everybody else I was shocked,” she recalls.

But OPM apparently thought otherwise, again citing her “deliberate misrepresentation” in its report. Relying heavily on that investigation, NSF handed Barr a letter on 25 July saying that it planned to terminate her IPA at the end of the first year because the OPM review had found her to be unfit for the job…Barr was given a chance to appeal NSF’s decision, and on 11 August she submitted a letter stating that OPM’s summary report of its investigation “contains many errors or mischaracterizations of my statements.” As is standard practice, agencies receive only a summary of the OPM investigation, not a full report, and lawyers familiar with the process say that an agent’s interview notes are typically destroyed after the report is written.

via Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist | Science/AAAS | News.

New Video on Exploring CS at UCLA

Nice job — I like the interviews with the students the best (though Jane rocks, of course).

In case the embedded video doesn’t work, click here: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/intotheloop.jsp

Education research team successfully launches innovative computer science curriculum

“Exploring Computer Science” boosts female student participation in L.A. school district to double the national average

Jane Margolis is an educator and researcher at UCLA, who has dedicated her career to democratizing computer science education and addressing under-representation in the field. Her work inspires students from diverse backgrounds to study computer science and to use their knowledge to help society. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Margolis and her team investigated why so few girls and under-represented minorities are learning computer science. They developed “Exploring Computer Science,” or ECS, to reverse the trend.

CS Leadership Session on CS Education in K-12 at the National Scale

The Snowbird conference is the every-other-year meeting of deans and department chairs in computing, to talk about how to support computing research and education.  There was a panel this last summer on the state of CS education in K-12.

This panel discusses the role that U.S. research departments must play in sustaining CS in K-12. The panelists will address issues of educational reform, while highlighting the role that academia has played in other disciplines; illustrate the breadth of existing efforts from the perspective of a university-led project; and consider how departments could contribute to building the needed research base for CS education.Chair: Jan Cuny NSF. Speaker: Jeanne Century CEMSE, University of Chicago, Dan Garcia University of California at Berkeley, Susanne Hambrusch Purdue University

via Snowbird Conference 2014 – Computing Research Association.

The slides are available here. I particularly liked Susanne Hambrusch’s slides on the role of computing education research in the University.  The slide below (copied from her deck) addresses a particularly critical point — computing education research has to be seen as a real research area, not just what some education-focused faculty do.

This tension between computing education research being research versus supporting the education mission of the University comes up often for me.  I was recently asked, “How does your work with high school teachers improve the education of CS undergraduates at our school?”  I replied, “It probably doesn’t.  This is my research.  I’ll bet that researchers in your medical school study cancers that your undergraduates don’t have.” Susanne is pointing out that we have to get past this confusion.  Yes, Universities teach.  But Universities also study and explore questions of interest.  If those questions of interest involve education, it should not be immediately confounded with the teaching that Universities do.

 

NSF I-Corps Offers Funds to Scale and Sustain Learning Inventions

Quite cool that this is available for education projects, too:

NSF’s Innovation Corps Teams Program (I-Corps Teams: NSF 12-602) has created a new opportunity, called I-Corps for Learning Teams (I-Corps L). I-Corps L supports taking discoveries and promising practices from education research and development and promoting opportunities for widespread adoption, adaptation, and utilization.

I-Corps L teams will receive support – in the form of mentoring and funding – to accelerate innovation in learning that can be successfully scaled, in a sustainable manner. There are a number of analogous elements between trying to bring product discoveries to market and getting learning innovations into broad practice. Getting the best evidence-based practices out to potential adopters, where those practices can benefit large numbers of students or learners, rather than just in a few classrooms or informal learning organizations, requires an entrepreneurial approach. I-Corps L can benefit education researchers by helping them to identify approaches that are effective in STEM teaching and learning.

To be eligible to pursue funding through I-Corps L, applicants must have been associated with a prior award from NSF (in a STEM education field relevant to the proposed innovation) that is currently active or that has been active within five years from the date of the proposal submission. The lineage of the prior award extends to the PI, Co-PIs, Senior Personnel, Post-doctoral Researchers, Professional Staff or others who were supported under the award.

To be considered for NSF’s I-Corps L Teams program, Executive Summaries (see below) must be submitted by September 30, 2014 to be considered for participation in the January 2015 cohort. Funding for each I-Corps L Team is $50,000 per award, for up to six months.

New NSF Solicitation to Revolutionize Whole Departments

The below note was posted by Jeff Forbes to the SIGCSE Members list.  What an interesting idea — funding to change a whole department!

NSF has posted a new solicitation for proposals, IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED).

RED focuses on efforts to effect significant, systemic departmental change that impacts undergraduate student success in their formation as computer scientists or engineers. This program is particularly interested in efforts that address the middle two years of the four year undergraduate experience, during which students receive the bulk of their formal technical preparation. RED proposals need to engage the entire department, and the effort must be led by the chair/head of the department.

See http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505105 for more information.

Note: “Engineering departments” in the solicitation refers to both engineering and computer science departments, regardless of whether those departments are in a school of Engineering.

Letters of Intent are due October 28, 2014.