and yet CS is declining….
Data from the NEAP HS Transcript Study is reporting that students are taking more STEM courses in their completion of a high school diploma. Yet we continue to struggle with enrollment numbers in computer science. Maybe thats the wrong sentence. Perhaps it is that we continue to struggle against the problem of starting and maintaining successful HS computer science programs.
I dont think anyone would argue that there are wonderful programs out there, mostly because of the FANTASTIC teachers who run them. But we have yet to figure out how to bottle that to grow that model into new schools, or schools where the program is waning.
Within the data from the NEAP report you can see that the computer-related course taking has actually increased. I’m not sure how they judged computer-related however. There are two coding areas from the CSSC course codes that were used that apply to computer science - Both 07-03 (07 is the Business heading and 03 is the particular part which includes CS) and the entire section of 11 (although this also includes courses like “computer appreciation”, “computer math”, Introduction to the Internet”, as well as APCS.
Unfortunately neither of those subjects are available using the online data tools. I should make a request to get at the data and look at what happens when you remove the “applications” course codes from the data and re-calculate the graph on the bottom of page 9 of the publication.
More about this, I promise..