In need of a Base Case
Comments about coding, research and life

Earlier this morning Marcia Linn gave the Keynote at ICER entitled “Learning to Teach Computer Programming”. The work that she talked about, while containing some historical perspective about teaching computer science, was mostly about a new report “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge” and two initiatives: Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills Movement.

I have not read the Cyberlearning report, so I do not have a lot to comment about it.

As far as the Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills movement - first I was very happy to hear the “21st Century Skills” agenda introduced at a computer science. She even gave a link to the 21stcenturyskills.org website and showed their “rainbow” curriculum model.

Marcia showed us a simulation from the WISE collection of Science simulations and tried to model how this was a computational thinking/21st Century Skill activity. (It was about global temperature and you could control the amount of C02 that was added to the environment) I was not convinced that it was truly a computational thinking activity. One of the features of computational thinking that I was struck by the first time I heard Jeanette Wing speak about it was the idea that Automation was one of the three key aspects of computational thinking. Its not just about looking a representation of information, but it is about somehow automating some process. The WISE collection of activities is great, but I’m not sure its really computational thinking.

Marcia also talked about a cycle of knowledge building that can be used through a tutor or electronic environment where students go through a 4 stage process of generating ideas, adding ideas, evaluating those ideas and finally sorting the ideas based on the evaluation. This reminded me a little of the misconception research that says you need to expose student’s misconceptions in order to move past them, however it was unclear how incorrect ideas in this process would be “weeded out”.

Still processing what my take away from that talk will be.

International Benchmarking
Mark Schneider

Two components to international benchmarking (comparing students from different countries). These are comparison of performance and also comparison of the standards in both locations.

Mark talked about the PISA and TIMSS exams that students take to compare between countries. The PISA exam has an emphasis on globalization and the 21st century skills. What are those skills and how do we assess them - I think that’s an interesting question. The US in 2006 scored 24 points below on the average math score. Note to self: go and look at the PISA exam.

Robert Hauser
What PISA Can Tell us About Quality and Equity in the Performance of Students and Schools
“In order to get reasonable benchmarks you have to have reasonable analysis and you have to be humble about what your data can tell you”

When looking at how the different countries perform on international assessments, much more predictive than economic factors, is the between and within school variance. Countries with greater variance in these areas tend to score weaker on the international assessments like PISA.

Estimating Performance Below the National Level
Dan Sherman

Discussed using school level means to compare schools, states, etc. from the TIMSS study.

IES Panel Session
Moderator: Carol O’Donnell, NCER

I chose this session for many reasons, but partially because we have so many “pockets of excellence” in CS education research - especially when it comes to equity.

Most IES grants are goal 2 - designed to create interventions (goal 1 - innovative ideas, goal 3 - efficacy, goal 4 - scale up) There’s more information about this at the IES web site (http://www.ies.ed.gov) - and if you are looking to fund an academic or motivational intervention IES can be as important as NSF in your grant seeking path.

Definitions:
Scale up is the transition from idiosyncratic adoption of interventions to broad, effective implementation across a large and diverse school system. Scale up can be demonstrated by showing a plan for the gradual systematic implementation of the intervention.

**How do you go from people who thought of, or adopted the intervention on their own to a larger number of sites where the intervention is brought to them.

Other aspects of scale up involve increased diversity and what factors are affected by those larger settings.

“How much tolerance do your interventions have for bottom up change?” When implementing a program in a scale up evaluation you need to think about what things in the intervention will be modified or played with as they are implemented and how does that mitigate effect size?

*Your model needs to be flexible enough that you can deal with some of the changes going on, but strong enough that you get the same results.

There needs to be a move from the researchers delivering the professional development to a state where the researchers deliver the professional development.

*They are looking for goal 4 studies at the post-secondary level (any university studies out there looking to scale up to multiple campuses?)

What kind of support tools can be included as a part of the original intervention that will help with the fidelity of scale up evaluation?

Lots of interesting questions and comments in this session.

“I’m a deep believer in the power of data to inform our decisions”. The talk focused mostly on the need for the increased use of data in education. Not only the need to gather it, but also to make it available to educators and resources.

“We are convinced that with unprecedented resources must come unprecedented reform”. Arne talked about the stimulus package and the large percentage of that which is earmarked for education. He called for reform that would make a huge impact on the quality and equity of education in the US.

“Part of the problem is that people do not know how to read data, how to sift through it”. He talked about people not understanding just how bad their schools are, and how they fight for no change in situations where change is needed.

Some Facts:
* 30% of our children do not graduate high school
* Many of our students who do graduate, still need remediation

“We now have 50 different states all measuring success differently - 46 states and 3 territories have agreed to work on a common core”. A call for national standards! This puts the work that we did on CS standards very timely.

“In the long run reform is all about jobs - we need to educate our way to a better economy”

“Rather than state the obvious (some schools work and some dont) we descend into an ideological debate and forget that this is about children”

“Reforming public education is not just a moral obligation, it is an economic imperative”

It was a very interesting talk - I need to process some more I think - but please comment or question the quotes. I’d love to start a real conversation here.

IES stands for the Institute of Education Sciences and they are the research branch of the US department of Education. Aside from being important to me because they fund the program that I am a part of (PIER), they also define the standard of education research in the United States.

Their research focus is highly diverse, with a strong emphasis on math, science, literacy and cognitive factors affecting education.

This morning is the opening plenary of the conference and the keynote speaker is Arne Duncan the Secretary of Education for the US Department of Education. Of course there are other opening talks as well. I’m going to try and live blog much of the event, for note taking purposes for me as well as sharing with anyone reading this.

John Baron (NBES Vice Chair):

John talked about the NCLB assumptions that researchers understood what worked for teaching students. An excellent example of this is the Reading First program. They spent millions of dollars to scale this program up across the country, and after years of evaluation and implementation, they show no effect on children’s literacy.

He made an interesting point that many of the research projects funded were researcher-generated and not practitioner generated. He called for more practitioner generated models (not to the exclusion of researcher generated models) in order to supplement the current research generation cycle. It sounds like he is asking researchers to reach out to practitioners and find out what they are doing well - to help generate new research ideas. I think this is really important - I’m not sure if it would be as easy to come up with ideas without my experience.

Sometimes a complex model is more appropriate than a simplified one. I think we need cognitive science researchers to help tease apart and find the components of the model that contribute to its success - much like the mythbusters episode where they find out exactly what about mentos and cola make the fountains (they add the ingredients separately until they get reactions).

Its a hard thing though to get all those pieces together in one place, or one group of people.

John Eastman (Director of IES):
John talked about a current study in the Chicago Public Schools where they are doing a time interrupt series to look at policy changes within the district. I wonder what kind of research could be conducted within our subjects that way. You look at several years of data where the central point is some policy change that was implemented and see what kind of change occurs in the slope of the outcome. Has your department/school done anything like that? Implemented a large policy change, like having more students take CS or a curriculum change within the CS department? I’d love to see some rigorous studies make their way to SIGCSE or ICER with this design.

I wanted to take some time to reflect on the second two days of the summit before posting. After the second day (tuesday) there was some pushback from the group due to the process that we were engaging in. Many people were impatient about engaging in goal setting and creation of action items to pursue. Unfortunately that didnt even begin to happen until Wednesday morning. While I see that there was benefit in the process, it begged for a few more days of time. IMHO I believe that the problem wasnt the activities we engaged in, just the overall percentage of time spent getting to work.

On the second day we engaged in more discussion about what the future we imagine would look like in 2012. Its hard to believe thats only 3 years from now (sounds like some futuristic sci fi date..) but that influenced the dreams that some had. It seemed like some were aiming for 2020 or more with their visions, but still helpful to look ahead.

I believe my phrase for the week was “bubbles of excellence”. A common theme amongst the people who have been involved with this for more than 3 days is that we are having a problems with scalability. There are lots of great things going on in small places but its hard to replicate that from our current interactions in the CS Ed community.

One of the groups from the summit decided to work on a repository (and whether that means making a new and different repository from the existing projects, or to create something that can serve as an aggregator for what already exists) is part of the discussion. I find that to be an important project and hope that this project is one that moves forward.

The group I chose to work with was the elementary education group (which we defined as K-8). We felt it important to not try and reinvent the work others was doing and so a number of our goals are about identifying what is appropriate for K8 as well as promotion and teacher training for CS integration with currently taught subjects.

You can see the beginnings of what the groups have defined as goals on the Rebooting Computing website under community. If any of the defined groups catch your interest and you would like to help I can put you in touch with someone from that group if there is not contact information on the web.

One of the most satisfying things for me during the seminar was the personal contacts I made. I have a passion for educating teachers (it was something I was doing long before teaching CS) and its something I believe needs to be a key part of any effort to make CS education more pervasive in our schools.

What do you think needs to be a key part of any plan to EXPOSE every child to CS in a K12 environment? (does not necessarily mean teach everyone to program by the way)