Mark Guzdial

Georgia Tech is going through a strategic planning activity, where education is one of the focii. The goal is bold: To identify what Georgia Tech will and should be in twenty-five years.  That’s a long time!  To inform the discussion on education, we held “Days of Engagement” where students told us where Georgia Tech should be in 25 years and how they thought students should be taught then.

In discussions about the implications for the strategic plan for us in the School of Interactive Computing, I realized what was wrong with this picture.  Georgia Tech is 74% male, and 66% white (86% White + Asian) — with the percentages of being white and male much higher in STEM fields.  These aren’t at all like the kids we’re going to have 25 years.

By 2050, Whites are expected to be a minority in the United States. The percentage of women in the United States is rising.  Time predicts that the changing demographics of the United States are going to lead to dramatic changes over the next 10 years.  Certainly, these changes are going to impact who we teach and how we teach over the next 25 years.  We know that race matters when teaching, and that successful models teach differently for different cultural value systems.

Why ask a bunch of mostly white boys what they want in the future of education, when it won’t be students like them we’re educating?  White males are not the growth market for computing education, or STEM education more broadly.  In market-speak, white boys are boring.  We need to figure out different models for a different group of students.  We have to figure out how to broaden participation in computing, because the alternative is nobody in computing.  Demographically, white males are going away.

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1 day, 9 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

Carl Wieman’s talk at SIGCSE 2010 was intriguing.  I really liked the teaching practices that he recommended.  I didn’t buy his explanations for why they were good.  But as I’ve started poking at the references he provided, I’m finding that there is evidence to support at least some of his claims.  I’m downloading more in order to dig deeper.

(Yeah, I was too far away for this photo.)

Carl said that the goal of his institute is both to have students learn more effectively and to make teaching more efficient and rewarding for the teacher.  He recommends a model of carefully identifying the components of expertise, measuring the development of expertise in students, and iteratively experimenting and assessing to get it right.  He identified expert competence as having lots of facts, having a good knowledge organization framework, and monitoring one’s own understanding and learning. The goal of science education is to get students to be more like that.

Carl first presented evidence that we’re not doing well now.  He cited a paper by Richard Hake describing a 6,000 student survey (Yes! Three zeroes there!) showing that “On average, students learn less than 30% of concepts that they did not already know in lecture classes. Lecturer quality, class size, and institution doesn’t matter.”  With improved methods, that can rise to 40-60% or better.

He gave four principles of effective learning and teaching. (1) Motivation which he said is “essential, but often neglected.” (2) Connecting with and building on prior thinking. (3) Applying what is known about memory (where he recommended Robert Bjork’s work). And (4) explicit authentic practice of expert thinking.  This last part is where he went into an argument that I didn’t quite buy.  He said that “Brain development is much like muscle development.” It takes lots of practice, and that’s why motivation is so important.

Now, when I took cognitive science in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I was told explicitly that the brain was not a muscle and shouldn’t be thought about that way.  It wasn’t about practice.  So, I started digging into it.  Looks like Wieman is right!  There are these really intriguing studies showing that simply telling kids that the brain is like a muscle leads to better learning.  Of course, it’s still controversial, and it’s not about the brain being biologically similar to muscle. It’s about thinking about brain development as being like muscle development. Practice matters.

Carl pointed out errors that we make as teachers by not taking all of this into account.  For example, weighting exams most heavily in determining course grades is counter-productive.  Making exams important leads to cramming, which does result in better exam performance — and minimizes long term retention of that information.  You learn it only for the exam.

Then Carl claimed that lectures tend to cover too much material. We should try to teach less per lecture because there are limits on short term memory.  We shouldn’t try to teach more than seven concepts in a lecture, because we can only hold 7+/-2 subjects in short term memory.  Now, I don’t buy this one.  The duration of short term memory is at most 10 minutes, or as short as 30 seconds.  That’s not lecture-length times.  Cognitive load is certainly a critical issue, but I don’t know of evidence (and can’t find any yet) supporting the argument for no more than seven concepts per 60-90 minute lecture.

Several of the methods that Carl promoted really resonated with me.  His argument that we should start top-down, with an interesting problem and then explain what’s needed to solve it (as opposed to bottom-up, providing background knowledge, and then problems that integrate that knowledge) meshes with our notions of contextualized-computing education.  He’s a big fan of peer learning and the use of “clickers” in classrooms.  He provided lots of pointers to what he called “more scientific forms of teaching.”

Carl’s talk has me digging into areas of educational psychology than I’ve not looked at in a long time.  He’s also got me thinking about how to implement some of his methods in computing classrooms.  How do we give “quick, effective” feedback on homework?  No way is entering a whole program into an IDE then interpreting Java error messsages counts as “quick and effective”!  (Alex Repenning had a great quote from a student in his talk: “Computer science class?  That’s where the teacher gives you a program on the board, then you type it in, and it doesn’t work.”)  How do we provide homework or in-class activity that gets at expert computing thinking skills, like debugging and testing, without overloading that with also having to design programs, write programs, enter programs, and fight the compiler’s error messages?

Another great note keynote well worth the price of admission, er, the time and expense to travel to Milwaukee for SIGCSE 2010.

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1 week, 2 days ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

Some new results point out that having black teachers has an important impact on getting black students to continue in science.  What’s particularly interesting for me is that they did not find that gender of teachers had a particular impact on female students.  This echoes a finding by Joanne Cohoon about computer science from several years ago, but I do keep hearing from teachers that having female teachers is critical for getting female students to succeed in computing. Joanne found that the gender of the teacher didn’t matter — it was encouragement that mattered, whether from a female or male teacher.

A new study points to another factor: the role of black college instructors in encouraging black science students to persist as science majors. The study finds a statistically significant relationship between black students who plan to be a science major having at least one black science instructor as freshmen and then sticking to their plans. The finding could be significant because many students (in particular members of under-represented minority groups) who start off as science majors fail to continue on that path — so a change in retention of science majors could have a major impact. At the same time, the study did not find a similar impact based on gender.

via News: Race Matters – Inside Higher Ed.

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1 week, 2 days ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

I’m excited to see discussions about the new AP exam and course “Computer Science: Principles”showing up in the blogosphere. Beki likes them!

I really like these principles. I know that they’re focused on Advanced Placement Computer Science (this is the American notion of allowing some students to take college level courses in high school). But I think they have broader relevance , (and the content behind each of these principles could distinguish what they are used to teach). What I like is that they are organized around principles that cross-cut a set of disciplinary silos Computer Science has gotten too used to.

via CS Principles « Beki’s Blog (there’s an original name).

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1 week, 1 day ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

I only just got back from Milwaukee and SIGCSE 2010 yesterday afternoon, so I’m still too tired and frazzled to be reflective yet.  However, that’s never stopped me from voicing an opinion before!  Two ideas are popping up regularly in my thoughts about the event.

First, about adoption of a curriculum approach:  I think we’ve reached a new stage with Media Computation.   Based on the theory of innovation diffusion, we are at least at “Early Adopters” and may even be in “Early Majority.”  Yes, people came up to Barb and I several times this last week to tell us, “I’m using your book!”  That’s much appreciated!  What’s really exciting, though, are all the uses beyond our books.  It’s less about the books, and more about the approach, the idea of using media manipulation as a context for introductory computing. That’s really exciting.

I had even more people coming up to me saying, “I’m using Media Computation.”  When I asked for more information, I’d learn that they’re using 1/2 the term, or at least one assignment, with sound or image manipulation.

Of the six presenters at our session on “Variations on a Theme,” only two were “using our book.”  Four had built their own libraries, one of which was in Scheme!  I met several people using the Luther College cImage package — some even without using their book.  Multiple libraries floating around suggests that the idea is getting more well-established.

I’m thrilled that there was finally a “Nifty Assignment” using Media Computation.  When we tried to get Media Computation assignments in previously, we were told that they didn’t want “special software.” They want “Nifty Assignments” to be something that anybody could do.  So, the appearance of a MediaComp “Nifty” suggests: It’s going mainstream.

The second thought that keeps coming to me is not nearly so pleasant.  Several people at SIGCSE 2010 were talking about their intro courses as being as full as they’ve ever been.  Now, if those intro course enrollments turn into majors and later course enrollments, then the enrollment crisis has ended.  As a side issue, I do have some doubts and concerns about that.  Schools that I’ve been hearing from have had rising introductory course enrollments for the last year or two, but aren’t seeing those students in later classes.

Barb pointed out the real problem to me.  The looming crisis is about teacher availability.

High school teachers.  Just before we left for SIGCSE, we heard that Georgia is losing some of the new CS teachers that we’ve helped create in the last few years through “Georgia Computes!”   School districts are cutting back, and telling schools to lay off teachers.  Some of these schools and districts are unionized (or follow union rules) which require layoffs to be based on seniority.  Our new CS teachers are the newest teachers in the school. Thus, we’re losing the CS teachers first.  I heard on Saturday from Chris Stephenson of CSTA that this is happening in California, too.  Just as we’re making progress, we might end up losing ground through bureaucracy of cutbacks.

Undergraduate faculty.  At SIGCSE, I learned of two top-ranked institutions (both in the top 20 of computer science departments in the US) that are laying off teaching staff — really good teaching staff, leaders in the national CS education community.  The cause is pretty simple.  Universities and colleges are getting their budgets cut, too.  They can’t easily lay off tenure track, research-focused faculty. They are instead laying off their teaching-track faculty.

Schools tend to be lagging economic indicators.  First, industry picks up, job numbers increase, then tax revenues increase, and finally budget increases flow to schools.  Since those first events are (arguably) just starting, those latter ones are still a way off.  We may lose more teachers than we gain in next couple years.  This may put growth in computing enrollments and graduate production at risk.  I hope I’m

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6 days, 8 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

In earlier studies conducted in Greenfield and other schools, the software has improved student math test scores by 10 percent, a critical difference for those who are struggling to pass. As Woolf explains, “Our original work was to find out where girls needed extra attention and how to give it to them. According to our studies, the extra support they need compared to boys is more about emotion than information.”

via UMass Amherst Office of News & Information : News Releases : UMass Amherst Computer Scientists Develop an Emotion-Sensitive, Computer-based Tutor That Improves Girls’ Math Scores.

The part that I think is really fascinating is how the computer senses emotion.

Most recently, they’ve added sensors and cameras so the computer can recognize when students are happy or stressed, fidgeting, frustrated or feeling confident. Guided by such cues, the “learning companion” character reaches out with encouraging words to praise a student’s effort, offer a hint or suggest that trying again is an important aspect of learning.

The article seems to suggest that it’s not a gender-specific need for more emotion-sensitivity, but that it’s about trying to correct waning interest in girls.  The emotion sensitivity is about trying to remind the girls that they used to like math.

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6 days, 7 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

Betsy DiSalvo defended her dissertation proposal (based on her Glitch project) this morning. Her presentation was amazing — engaging and thought-provoking.

Betsy is coming at the question of engaging African-American men in computing from a cultural perspective.  What do these teens value?  What do they want to achieve?  She designed Glitch in a participatory fashion, with several smaller activities and workshops to inform her design of Glitch.  She learned that the middle schoolers whom she was trying to involve in game testing just weren’t engaging, but the high school students bought in.  She asked students to look at a user interface (with bugs in it) then challenged them to fix the underlying code, where they’d never seen program code before.  Her subjects found that fascinating:

I learned that I might take interest in that career…With the language, I really want to learn how to read stuff like that, to understand what it means not just letters and objects in a square, but to understand.

The real challenge in teaching computer science to these students is that learning about technology is not a value for them in their culture.  As Betsy phrased it, as a research question: “If the collective identity of young African American men does not encourage technology production for the love of making or learning, then how do face-saving tactics allow for participation, and what are the limitations?”  While she believes that the Glitch game testers were actually interested in learning the computer science, she had to provide them with face-saving tactics in order to give them a way of engaging in front of their peers.  So, she set up competitions, because competitiveness and sportsmanship were part of their cultural values, and her participants could work hard at finding bugs because, “I want to win.” Betsy paid them, so that they could put in extra hours because “It’s my job” and “to make money,” where having a job was important to their culture and family values.

One of the things she found was pushback from some (not all) of her students for using Alice.  It was “a toy,” and not what real game developers used.  It was hard enough for the kids to find a way to engage in CS, and then to be “insulted” with a toy was a significant issue.

Betsy’s results are already really interesting. She’s getting some big changes in attitudes about studying CS and going on to college.  In her dissertation study, she’s going to explore more these issues of “face-saving” and about providing strategies for learning that avoid conflict with cultural values.  Her work tells us a lot about how to make computing into a viable career choice for students in different cultural settings.

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5 days, 9 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

Yesterday, at Betsy diSalvo’s proposal defense, I got to talk to Willie Pearson (another member of Betsy’s committee, and an expert on the sociology of science, including science education) about this development — that several minority-serving programs are being merged into one larger, umbrella program at NSF.  He seemed to think it’s a good idea.  There is a risk that one group might get more funding while another group gets less (or even ignored) in this new umbrella model.  However, it also brings new players to the table.  For example, Georgia Tech was unable to apply for some of the earlier funding (e.g., since it’s not an HBCU), but would be able to apply now to fund the variety of efforts that we have going on in supporting minorities pursuing STEM education (e.g., Georgia Tech is top in the country in producing African American and Hispanic engineering doctorates).

In place of those programs, the science foundation would get $103-million to run a program called Comprehensive Broadening Participation of Undergraduates in STEM, in which “STEM” refers to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The budget for the new program, part of the $6-billion that the NSF spends each year to support academic research, would be 14 percent greater than the amount now spent on the three programs proposed for elimination.

The director of the National Science Foundation, Arden L. Bement Jr., described the plans on Wednesday…”Linear growth is no longer acceptable,” Mr. Bement told lawmakers, “so we have to go into geometric growth.”

via NSF Seeks New Approach to Helping Minority Students in Science – Government – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Just to place some context here: This new program (in the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Directorate in NSF) will be funded at just over $100 million.  The sum total of all funding for computing education in the Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at NSF (i.e., the sum of BPC and CPATH programs) is around $20 million.  If we want to build large programs that have dramatic impact in computing education, the funding is in EHR.  CISE can start up programs, can build prototypes and models, and can point the way.  We can start things in CISE, but if we really want to build large interventions, we need to go after EHR funding.

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4 days, 11 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

People still argue that learning Latin improves “critical thinking skills” and “comparative analysis skills.”  Despite these claims, there is little evidence that spontaneous transfer occurs from general learning. Transfer is hard, requires lots of initial knowledge, and works best when students are explicitly taught to transfer. Explicitly, learning Latin does not lead to general thinking skills.  Next up? Creating video games!

Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them could boost students’ critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. They discuss details in the current issue of the International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing.

via Teaching computer games.

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3 days, 11 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com

I wonder if this new bill could be used to support computing education, too.

To award planning grants and implementation grants to State educational agencies to enable the State educational agencies to complete comprehensive planning to carry out activities designed to integrate engineering education into K-12 instruction and curriculum and to provide evaluation grants to measure efficacy of K-12 engineering education.

via Search Results – THOMAS (Library of Congress).

One of findings is:

The introduction of engineering education has the potential to improve student learning and achievement in science and mathematics, increase awareness about what engineers do and of engineering as a potential career, and boost students’ technological literacy, according to a new report, `Engineering in K-12 Education‘ from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Research Council (NRC).

and it defines ‘technological literacy’ here:

Schools, policy makers, and other stakeholders often narrowly refer to the term `technologically literate’ as the ability to use educational technologies. Although educational technology is important, it is far from the only type of technology we depend on in a modern society. In 2006, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council’s report, `Technically Speaking’, outlined a broader view of `technological literacy’, one more consistent with how scientists, engineers, and technologists see the world. In this view, technological literacy includes–

(A) knowledge of technology, the engineering design process, and impacts on society;

(B) critical thinking and decisionmaking weighing benefits, risks, costs, and tradeoffs; and

(C) capability to use a variety of technologies, apply the design process, fix simple technological problems, and obtain and understand information about technological issues.

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2 days, 11 hours ago onWordpress in computinged.wordpress.com