CSEd

This is a summary of the Google pre-college CS Research

stemcenter.utexas.edu/cs-data – Texas CS Data – who is teaching? 

Content:

  1. Innovative ways to organize learning environments
  2. Mental model of what computers are and how they run code, and how to interpret, trace, and debug programs
  3. Acquiring and assessing expertise might not follow the same patterns of traditional school disciplines
  4. Focus on student project-based work and alignment with learner interests and ways of expression.

Needs:

  1. CSEd should be a mandatory content area in public schools in order to overcome biases and structural inequalities that prevent equitable participation. Partial or selective rollouts have the potential to exacerbate social disparities and educational inequalities
  2. CSEd research must become more rigorous and connect more with new and established knowledge in cognitive science, education, learning sciences, and data mining.
  3. New funding pathways are also viewed as necessary for sustaining basic and applied research.
  4. Creating tool to help teachers manage and assess complex student projects
  5. Decide on the kind of preparation and development teachers receive

New Knowledge:

Research across grade levels reveals that students’ mental models about what a computer does when it executes programs predicts how well they learn to program, so the learning of such models should be a major focus in CSEd curricula.