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Eric RobertsProfessor of Computer Science, Stanford University
NACCQNapier, New Zealand
12 July 2009
Restoring thePassion, Beauty, Joy and Awe
Fixing Secondary Education Is Essential
Source: Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 2005
• In my talk yesterday, one of the factors I cited behind the decline in student numbers is that the exposure students get in primary and secondary schools tends to discourage any interest in computing long before they reach university.
• This problem is reflected in the fact that only a tiny fraction of students graduating from secondary schools in the United States express any interest in computing as a field of study.
• Further evidence comes from the decline in students who take the Advanced Placement examination in Computer Science, which is analogous to A-levels in the UK or to the NQF here.
• The AP/CS exam is the only subject that has declined over the last five years and now ranks below Latin in terms of the number of students taking the exam.
Image Is a Huge Problem in SchoolsIn 1998, sixth-graders in selected California schools were asked to draw their image of a computer professional. The drawings are for the most part aligned with traditional stereotypes:
But Change Is Possible • In 1998, Stanford initiated a project—which I directed jointly
with my colleague Professor Brigid Barron at the School of Education—to design a new computer science curriculum for Bermuda’s public secondary schools.
• The Bermuda Project was a public-private partnership linking the Ministry of Education with Bermuda-based companies.
• The initial goals of the Bermuda Project were to:– Support the development of technological literacy– Prepare all students for work or undergraduate study– Develop a cadre of highly skilled students who are globally competitive
• Over the next six years, our Bermuda Project team developed a computing curriculum for Bermuda’s public schools that remains in place today.
About Bermuda • British overseas territory lying
600 miles east of North Carolina.
• Land area just over 20 square miles (less than twice the size of the Stanford campus).
• Total population of only 62,000 (only slightly larger than Napier) with two public high schools: Berkeley and Cedarbridge.
• Local parliament has had a Labour majority since 1998.
• Considerable national wealth, primarily from companies that relocate to Bermuda as a tax haven.
• The CIA World Factbook for 2005 listed Bermuda as having the highest GDP per capita in the world.
The Project Appears Successful
• Students were given pre- and post-tests in several classes to assess levels of learning.
• Students completed survey questionnaires to determine their level of satisfaction, their interest in further computing courses, and their eventual career plans.
• We conducted in-depth videotaped interviews with 38 students.
• An independent team from Boston University evaluated the program and found it to be “excellent.”
• The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) evaluated and certified the curriculum in 2003, making it the first ISTE-certified national curriculum in the world.
We undertook several different assessment strategies to determine the success of the project, including the following:
Projections of Future Selves
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
taking morecomputerclasses
Majoring incomputerscience
Becoming aprogrammer
Owning abusiness
Becoming aweb designer
Becoming acomputernetwork
specialist
Becoming acomputerteacher
Proportion of students
one class
two classes
three classes
four classes
five classes
• In 2005, we sent questionnaires to 300 students who took the Introduction to Computing course between 1999 and 2001, who were by then out of high school.
• We received 71 responses (24%).
• Of the respondents, 29 (41%) had IT-related jobs.
And Remember the Student ImagesIn Bermuda, we repeated this experiment after students had taken our courses and got rather different results:
Images of Computing (Bermuda) In Bermuda, we repeated this experiment after students had taken our courses and got rather different results:
Jan Cuny’s “Clean Slate” Project
http://www.cra.org/Activities/summit/Cuny_A_Clean_Slate_Approach_to_High_School_CS.pdf
The End
http://bermuda.stanford.edu
http://cs.stanford.edu/~eroberts/