This CPATH award brings together community colleges and universities in five regions including Bunker Hill Community College and University of Massachusetts Boston in Massachusetts, Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University in Virginia, Ivy Tech Community College and Purdue University in Indiana, Cameron University in Oklahoma and City College of San Francisco and California State - Monterrey in California. The partners plan to revitalize undergraduate computing education through new research that correlates Computational Thinking (CT) with the new Information Technology Volume developed by the Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education of the Association for Computing Machinery to develop a CT framework for researching and building instructional elements. This resulting product identifies core computing concepts, methodologies, frameworks, and tools that may be applied across a variety of institutions and inform teaching and learning in undergraduate computing in a variety of environments. Each of the five partnerships consists of a paired team comprised of a university and a community college. The benefit of this arrangement is to ensure the focus is firmly set on undergraduate computing and that the outcomes and findings of this project develop core CT skills that improve matriculation and transfer from lower to upper division IT and computer science programs.

Intellectual Merit: This project develops innovative instructional scenarios and related assessments specifically aligned to develop and enhance CT outcomes for lower division computing students. The project partners will develop instructional elements and techniques that not only impart cognitive knowledge but that also pose authentic situations for students wherein CT attributes can be developed and demonstrated. In order to differentiate between cognitive knowledge gains and improvement in CT skills, faculty working with the treatment groups will develop enhanced student assessments using Principled Assessment Design for Inquiry which produces evidence-centered assessment design. An excellent team has been assembled to lead this project which has the potential to produce new disciplinary foundations and serve as a model for computing for the future.

Broader Impacts: In explicitly including lower division and community college IT courses in computational thinking frameworks, this proposal breaks new ground. The project is to be disseminated to a broad audience covering the spectrum of undergraduate computing education and broadening participation organization. Each regional partner has additional regional dissemination foci, and the team is particularly interested in national dissemination of the results obtained through the pedagogical approaches investigated in this work, particularly as they may inform others with an interest in improving matriculation and transfer from lower to upper division IT programs. The models and results from the project thus have the potential to reach a diverse set of institutions with different student populations and thus provide pathways for preparing computing students for the workforce of the future.

Project Report

brought together a consortium of community colleges and associated 4-year universities spanning five states (Massachusetts, represented by Bunker Hill Community College and University of Massachusetts Boston; Virginia, represented by Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University; Indiana, represented by Ivy Tech Community College and Purdue University Calumet; Oklahoma, represented by Cameron University and California, represented by City College of San Francisco). This project built on the findings of prior CPATH work which explored successful transfer models to explore an innovative process that adapts the Association for Computing Machinery’s IT Body of Knowledge outcomes to Wing’s Computational Thinking taxonomy. The ASSECT CPATH II project had the following major goals: Goal 1: Develop a research-based computational thinking framework integrated with the ACM IT Volume; Goal 2: Pilot and implement authentic scenarios that provide opportunities to learn, demonstrate and assess computational thinking skills that advance from lower to upper division IT classes; and Goal 3: Provide professional development for faculty in effective pedagogical approaches and assessment techniques. Intellectual Merit A growing national consensus demands that students make interdisciplinary connections; take a global perspective; and apply the attributes of critical thinking and communication to the knowledge and skills gained. Toward this end, a particularly compelling aspect of this work has been the development of a rubric for computational thinking that had significant industry input from a diverse set of companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Mitre, Raytheon, Staples, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Partners Healthcare and professional organizations such as the MA Technology Leadership Council, TechAmerica and the San Francisco Software Council. Sixteen innovative instructional scenarios were created to provide opportunities for students to engage in industry problems and apply learning in more relevant ways, from more documentation-oriented (such as creating security and acceptable use policies for their school) to extremely active (creating a mobile app for an organization). ASSECT partners developed these instructional elements and techniques to not only impart cognitive knowledge but that also pose authentic situations for students wherein computational thinking attributes can be developed and demonstrated in lower division Computer Science and Information Technology students. Because pedagogy is a critical element in scenario-based teaching and learning, extensive professional development was provided to ensure that faculty were comfortable with a constructivist approach. In explicitly focusing on lower division and community college IT courses, this project added to the knowledge base of how to intellectually develop the computational thinking and problem-solving capabilities of students earlier in the educational progression. Broader Impacts Though each regional partner had a regional perspective, as a team we were particularly interested in national dissemination of the results obtained through the computational thinking and pedagogical approaches investigated in this work, particularly as they may inform others with an interest in building students’ problem-solving capabilities and improving student interest in and advancement through undergraduate computing programs. To that end, Bunker Hill Community College developed and offered an introductory course entitled "IT Problem-Solving" that mirrors the "big ideas" of CS Principles and contains a subset of the scenarios developed within this project. Using a constructivist approach, the course is built around the premise of helping students at the freshman level learn the computational thinking capabilities necessary to persist in an IT major and succeed in an IT career. It has also been adopted at University of Massachusetts Boston and has been replicated in City Colleges of Chicago as part of their Reinvention Project and in Chicago Public Schools as part of their Early College STEM School. In order to achieve a broader impact, ASSECT partners worked together to offer professional development that could expand its footprint and extend its reach. Purdue Calumet led the effort of developing, designing, and presenting introductory Computational Thinking via Scenario Based Learning (CT/SBL) workshops for middle and high school teachers from all disciplines and introducing CT/SBL concepts for infusion within their discipline. Bunker Hill Community College and UMass Boston took the lead in working with educators to implement new sequences for early college high school into the community college. George Mason University focused on developing expertise through direct student engagement by offering Saturday morning workshops for high school and middle school students that applied a problem-solving approach through an introduction to a variety of IT content. These professional development workshops on computational thinking and scenario-based learning offered throughout the country have impacted 78 middle school teachers, 119 high school teachers, 52 community college faculty and 19 University faculty. This has resulted in direct impact to over 1500 middle school students, over 4300 high school students, almost 2400 community college students and 1200 university students as collated through follow-up surveys.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)
Application #
0939089
Program Officer
Harriet G. Taylor
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2009-09-01
Budget End
2014-08-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$799,909
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Massachusetts Boston
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Dorchester
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02125