Charles Riedesel

Developing a computer science-specific learning taxonomy

Blooms taxonomy of the cognitive domain and the SOLO taxonomy are being increasingly widely used in the design and assessment of courses, but there are some drawbacks to their use in computer science. This paper reviews the literature on educational taxonomies and their use in computer science education, identifies some of the problems that arise, proposes a new taxonomy and discusses how this can be used in application-oriented courses such as programming.

Concept inventories in computer science for the topic discrete mathematics

This report describes concept inventories, specialized assessment instruments that enable educational researchers to investigate student (mis)understandings of concepts in a particular domain. While students experience a concept inventory as a set of multiple-choice items taken as a test, this belies its purpose, its careful development, and its validation. A concept inventory is not intended to be a comprehensive instrument, but rather a tool that probes student comprehension of a carefully selected subset of concepts that give rise to the most common and pervasive mismodelings. The report explains how concept inventories have been developed and used in other STEM fields, then outlines a project to explore the feasibility of concept inventories in the computing field. We use the domain of discrete mathematics to illustrate a suggested plan of action.

Enhancing the social issues components in our computing curriculum: computing for the social good

The acceptance and integration of social issues into computing curricula is still a work in progress twenty years after it was first incorporated into the ACM Computing Curricula. Through an international survey of computing instructors, this paper corroborates prior work showing that most institutions include the societal impact of ICT in their programs. However, topics often concentrate on computer history, codes of ethics and intellectual property, while neglecting broader issues of societal impact. This paper explores how these neglected topics can be better developed through a subtle change of focus to the significant role that ICT plays in addressing the needs of the community. Drawing on the survey and a set of implementation cases, the paper provides guidance by means of examples and resources to empower teaching teams to engage students in the application of ICT to bring about positive social outcomes -- computing for the social good.

Striving for mathematical thinking

Computer science and software engineering are young, maturing disciplines. As with other mathematically based disciplines, such as the natural sciences, economics, and engineering, it takes time for the mathematical roots to grow and flourish. For computer science and software engineering, others have planted these seeds over many years, and it is our duty to nurture them. This working group is dedicated to promoting mathematics as an important tool for problem-solving and conceptual understanding in computing.

A synthesis of computing concepts

This is the report of Working Group 4 of the ITiCSE Conference of 2005. The working group met to introduce some new participants into an ongoing project designed to explore the representation of all the computing and information related disciplines in a single, comprehensive, graphical and interactive structure. The goal of the work is to support the classification of research work, the development of curriculum recommendations and accreditation criteria, and the analysis of proposed programs of study.

Perspectives on developing and assessing professional values in computing

This paper discusses how to ensure that students attain professional values important to the workplace by integrating them into computing curricula. It describes a survey of the attitudes of students, faculty and professionals in computing towards the teaching and assessment of such values. The results show that these groups share a set of professional values, though students are less convinced of their importance in the work environment. There is broad consensus on the specific behaviors and attitudes reflective of these values to be developed in the curriculum. The groups differed in their opinions of whether these attitudes and behaviors could be workably assessed.

Academic integrity policies in a computing education context

Academic integrity policies embody widely accepted principles of ethics and behaviour, instantiating in their codes the standards and processes that apply to the institutions enacting them. Application of these principles to the field of computing, which has a variety of distinguishing practices and characteristics, is a non-trivial endeavour. Indeed, a number of computing departments have created their own policies that extend, replace, or interpret their institutional policies in the context of computing education and research. The emphases, development, implementation, and dissemination of institutional, departmental, and even class-level policies vary dramatically among universities and colleges. This paper is offered as a practical guide for computing academics and administrators to better understand their existing policies, how to apply them, and what is involved in crafting and revising them. Included are numerous examples of application of the principles and of policy options that span the needs of a wide range of institutions.

Enhancing the Social Issues Components in our Computing Curriculum: Computing for the Social Good

The acceptance and integration of social issues into computing curricula is still a work in progress twenty years after it was first incorporated into the ACM Computing Curricula. Through an international survey of computing instructors, this paper corroborates prior work showing that most institutions include the societal impact of ICT in their programs. However, topics often concentrate on computer history, codes of ethics and intellectual property, while neglecting broader issues of societal impact. This paper explores how these neglected topics can be better developed through a subtle change of focus to the significant role that ICT plays in addressing the needs of the community. Drawing on the survey and a set of implementation cases, the paper provides guidance by means of examples and resources to empower teaching teams to engage students in the application of ICT to bring about positive social outcomes - computing for the social good.

New Horizons in the Assessment of Computer Science at School and Beyond: Leveraging on the ViVA Platform

A revolution is taking place across Europe and worldwide in how we teach our children about computing, in primary and secondary school. Out goes ICT and how to use Microsoft Office; in comes coding and computer science. Assessment has a crucial role to play in this revolution. If teachers use low-quality assessment instruments we will end-up teaching the wrong subject; and viceversa. This paper reviews the state of the field, and makes concrete, achievable proposals for developing shared, high quality assessments for computer science. Central to this proposal is the collaborative platform VIVA (the Vilnius collaboratively coded and Validated computer science questions/tasks for Assess- ment). Two requirements are key to VIVA: 1) support for multiple competency frameworks, so that the contributors can meta-tag resources with respect to the framework they are most familiar with; and 2) support for crowdsourcing the validation of each question/task and its mapping to competencies. The use of a taxonomy of questions/tasks type that has been mapped to computational thinking concepts and to a competency framework is proposed. Some seed questions are already available in the online platform prototype, and various supporters have granted permission to use large questions banks. The design requirements of a full implementation of the VIVA platform for a modern and effective approach to assessment including support for digital badges, are outlined; and some preliminary results from a survey administered to the initial contributors to VIVA are presented.

Negotiating the Maze of Academic Integrity in Computing Education

Academic integrity in computing education is a source of much confusion and disagreement. Studies of student and academic approaches to academic integrity in computing indicate considerable variation in practice along with confusion as to what practices are acceptable. The difficulty appears to arise in part from perceived differences between academic practice in computing education and professional practice in the computing industry, which lead to challenges in devising a consistent and meaningful approach to academic integrity. Coding practices in industry rely heavily on teamwork and use of external resources, but when computing educators seek to model industry practice in the classroom these techniques tend to conflict with standard academic integrity policies, which focus on assessing individual achievement. We have surveyed both industry professionals and computing academics about practices relating to academic integrity, and can confirm the uncertainty and variability that permeates the field. We find clear divergence in the views of these two groups, and also a broad range of practices considered acceptable by the academics. Our findings establish a clear need to clarify academic integrity issues in the context of computing education. Educators must carefully consider how academic integrity issues relate to their learning objectives, teaching approaches, and the industry practice for which they are preparing students. To this end we propose a process that fulfils two purposes: to guide academics in the consideration of academic integrity issues when designing assessment items, and to effectively communicate the resulting guidelines to students so as to reduce confusion and improve educational practice.