High School CS Research Articles

Questioning the why and the how: Collective transformative agency of experienced teachers co-designing a justice-oriented high school introductory computing program

We report findings from qualitatively analyzing audio recordings and teacher-generated products from a two-day in-person collaborative design (co-design) workshop where nine experienced high school CS teachers revised parts of an existing introductory high school program toward justice. In response to our research question of how teachers demonstrated agency as co-designers, our analysis revealed that they collaboratively questioned the purpose, the “why,” and the approach, the “how,” and captured ideas in lesson templates and unit descriptions to transform future practice. We discuss co-design with teachers as openings to explore nuances of teachers’ visions for equitable CS education. We highlight the foundational longstanding relationships and politicized trust, and enabling features of the co-design space for equitable participation and joint creation of boundary objects to sustain ideas.

Teacher Perceptions of Equity in High School Computer Science Classrooms

Effective and equitable CS teaching is contingent on teachers’ robust understanding of equity issues in CS classrooms. To this end, this study examined high school teachers’ perceptions of equity during their participation in a CS teacher certificate program over two years. The participants are from various disciplines and from schools that serve under-represented students. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted content analysis of the teachers’ written reflections and responses to semi-structured interviews. Based on the justice-centered framework, we analyzed the major themes that emerged from the content analysis. The findings provide insights into high school CS teachers’ understanding of equity, the strategies that teachers use to address equity issues, and how teachers interpret the causes of inequities in CS classrooms. This research presents frameworks for examining teachers’ conceptualizations of equity and can inform the implementation of future professional development programs for CS teachers.

The persistent effect of pre-college computing experience on college CS course grades

Many college computer science majors have little or no pre-college computing experience. Previous work has shown that inexperienced students under-perform their experienced peers when placed in the same introductory courses and are more likely to drop out of the CS program. However, not much is known about what, if any, differences may persist beyond the introductory sequence for students who remain in the program. We conducted a study across all levels of a CS program at a large public university in the United States to determine whether grade differences exist between students with and without pre-college experience, and if so, for what types of experiences. We find significant grade differences in courses at all levels of the program. We further find that students who took AP Computer Science receive significantly higher average grades---by up to a half grade---in nearly all courses we studied. Pre-college experience appears to have a weaker relationship with retention and with low-stakes assessment grades. We discuss the limitations of these findings and implications for high school and college level CS courses and programs.

HIGH SCHOOL PERSPECTIVESMy journey to becoming a high school CS teacher

HIGH SCHOOL PERSPECTIVESMy journey to becoming a high school CS teacher

ICER conference report

ICER 2014, the 10th conference in the series, was held at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in early August. The stats, in brief: 68 paper submissions, 17 accepted; 10 lightning talks; 18 students attended the doctoral consortium. 79 folks attended the conference, including 13 Scottish high school CS teachers involved in a research programme.

Status update

Many countries are engaged in efforts to revamp their high school computer science curricula. This paper touches briefly on the state of affairs with high school CS in Canada, Israel, India, and New Zealand. Each country has different issues to address in implementing a concepts-rich high school computer science curriculum. The paper then reviews the recent report from the United Kingdom, Shut Down or Restart? The Way Forward for Computing in the UK Schools .

From idea to product

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications , we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Daniel Reed discusses how researchers communicate their project ideas to companies and product groups and get them successfully adopted. Mark Guzdial considers whether schools of education could create more high school CS teachers.

CS4HS

In this paper, we describe a pilot summer workshop (CS4HS) held at Carnegie Mellon University in July 2006 for high school CS teachers to provide compelling material that the teachers can use in their classes to emphasize computational thinking and the many possibilities of computer science. Diversity and broadening participation was explicitly addressed throughout the workshop. We focused on broadening the image of what CS is -- and who computer scientists are -- since the reasons for under-representation in the field are very much the same as the reasons for the huge decline in interest. We describe the design of the workshop along with results from initial surveys and evaluations. Short-term evaluations show that this workshop was successful in changing the perception of CS for these teachers and giving them the impetus to include broader topics in their programming courses for the upcoming school year. Future surveys will track the long-term effect of this workshop.

On the achievements of high school students studying computational models

One of the units in the relatively new high school CS curriculum which is being implemented in Israel is a theoretical unit on computational models. It includes deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata, regular and non-regular languages, closure properties of regular languages, pushdown automata, closure properties of context free languages, Turing machines, the Church-Turing thesis and the halting problem. This paper focuses on part of a study we conducted dealing with the achievements of high school students studying this unit. Specifically, this paper compares the achievements of students on the technical parts of this unit vs. its theoretical parts. We also examine the correlation between achievements of students studying the Computational Models unit, and two other factors: The students' previous computer-related background (not necessarily computer science) and the level on which they studied mathematics.

CS girls rock

Declining female enrollment in undergraduate Computer Science programs is a serious problem. Part of the solution lies in retaining more of the female students currently enrolled; even more important, however, is increasing initial enrollment. Many believe lack of interest to be rooted in stereotypes of computer science formed early in high school: that it is a boring subject, devoid of interesting applications and stimulating only to 'geeks'. To attract high school females to CS, and to determine whether early exposure to the interesting breadth of CS and its applications might ameliorate such attitudes, a week-long Computer Science Seminar for Grade 9 and 10 girls was held at the University of Waterloo. The seminar consisted of lectures, labs and activities chosen to demonstrate the breadth of CS and to dispel the negative stereotypes. Pre- and post-seminar surveys indicate a substantial increase in interest, translating directly into increased desire to take high school CS courses.

Curriculum and Course Syllabi for a High-School CS Program

The authors served on a committee that designed a high-school curriculum in computer science and has been supervising the preparation of a comprehensive study program based on it. The new program is intended for the Israeli high-school system, has been formally approved by the Ministry of Education, and is expected to fully replace the old one in the near future. The program emphasizes the foundations of algorithmics, and teaches programming as a way to get the computer to carry out an algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to describe the program's curriculum and syllabi in detail.