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

I know that there are a large number of people out there doing excellent work to encourage girls in computer science. A new US Department of Education program named Women’s Educational Equity. This has prompted 13 groups to apply and be awarded this funding. An interesting article here - is one of these institutions near you? Any of them doing computer science or just more general STEM?

I have been involved in the creation of the Sci-Tech high school in Pittsburgh. I’m not 100% positive but I believe some of the grant money awarded to Pgh public schools is going to the sci-tech program. One of the “strands” through the high school is computer science, and its interesting to see how this is growing.

Wow. Just go and read the press release. This is very exciting and hopeuflly a sign that more and more people are recognizing that K12 has a very large place in the discussion of computer science education. And on the other hand, it gives me hope that the STEM supporters are recognizing that something other than technology usage (like word and powerpoint) need to make up the T in STEM.

The ACM recently commissioned a marketing research report to find out what kind of message would be most successful in changing the attitudes of today’s youth towards computer science as a potential career path, and hopefully at the same time encouraging more people to enroll in computer science degree programs.

The report, which can be found here details the research methodology as well as the results.

In addition to the message findings, one of the more intriguing findings to me was that while there was significant difference for gender, there was no significant difference between ethnicities. African American and Latino boys were just as likely as Caucasian boys to think that computing is a viable and interesting career choice. This supports the research that Jane Margolis did in Stuck in the Shallow End, which indicated that inequities in the educational system were a large factor in why certain populations were missing from the computer science landscape.

In terms of messaging, the message that was most successful with the women was that Computing empowers you to do good. 38% of women reported this message as “Very Compelling”, and it was the third best ranked message overall.

Something in the key results that echoes a comment I made during a session at SIGCSE was that “The strongest positive driver towards computer science, or an openness to a career in computing is ‘having the power to create and discover new things’.” I made the comment that so many of our assignments are about recreating programs that students can find faster on Google than they can even load up the IDE and begin to think about programming it. Again I recommend to the community that we use this information to continue to design assignments that make use of new technology and social patterns within the use of computing in order to inspire our students and engage them in our classes.

This post is inspired by the Computing at School project “Computing, the next generation” which is being offered June 18th and 19th at the University of Birmingham in the UK (note - not Alabama).

The list of speakers (Tim Bell, Michael Kolling, and more) as well as the goals of the sessions are a good start to providing computer science for all to the population that needs to hear it - teachers.

If the requirements for joining the Computing at School group didnt involve travel to their meetings and putting time into a project (but just being a part of the conversation), I would sign up. Maybe when I’m done with the degree.

I would love to see how the presenters are approaching the CS for all movement (since I have great respect for the ones I am familiar with). Taking an interdisciplinary approach, or still holding CS as an individual subject. Either way is valid, but both have implications for dissemination of the ideas.

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.