Millions for a fairly useless new test

According to the College Board Press Release: The National Science Foundation Provides $5.2 Million Grant to Create New Advanced Placement® Computer Science Course and Exam.

Innovative College-Level AP® Course Created to Increase Interest in Computing Degrees and Careers, Particularly Among Female and Minority Students

To help ensure that more high school students are prepared to pursue postsecondary education in computer science, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is making a four-year, $5.2 million grant to the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) to fund the creation of AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP).

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The college-level AP CSP course will be introduced into thousands of high schools nationwide in fall 2016, with the first AP CSP Exam set to be administered in May 2017. Unlike computer science courses that focus on programming, AP CSP has been designed to help students explore the creative aspects of computing while also providing a solid academic foundation for understanding the intellectual concepts and practical contributions of computing. AP CSP includes a curriculum framework designed to promote learning with understanding, a digital portfolio to promote student participation throughout the year, and a course and assessment that is independent of programming language.

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Successful implementation of the AP CSP course will hinge on the ability to recruit and train qualified teachers with computer science backgrounds to teach the course. Through its CS 10K Project (10,000 computer science teachers in 10,000 high schools by 2016), NSF has been laying the foundation for an unprecedented, national effort to prepare educators to teach this new material using hands-on, inclusive curricula.

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The college-level AP CSP course will be introduced into thousands of high schools nationwide in fall 2016, with the first AP CSP Exam set to be administered in May 2017. Unlike computer science courses that focus on programming, AP CSP has been designed to help students explore the creative aspects of computing while also providing a solid academic foundation for understanding the intellectual concepts and practical contributions of computing. AP CSP includes a curriculum framework designed to promote learning with understanding, a digital portfolio to promote student participation throughout the year, and a course and assessment that is independent of programming language.   

I know that Mark Guzdial is fond of the Computer Science Principles (CSP) course that has been prototyped for a few years now at colleges, but I’m not convinced that it represents college-level course work (the supposed intent of AP courses and exams). I don’t know much more about the course than when I blogged about it in 2011, so my opinions in this article may reflect my own lack of knowledge about the course more than anything else.

I’m not saying that CSP is a bad course, or even that it is a bad introduction to computer science, but it seems to me to be at best high-school level. I know that many colleges disagree—the press release says

In a recent survey of 103 of the nation’s top colleges and universities, 87 percent confirmed that AP CSP requires the same content knowledge and skills as the related introductory college course, and 86 percent indicated a willingness to award college credit for qualifying scores on future AP CSP Exams.

There are also colleges that teach high school algebra and precalculus, but we don’t offer AP exams in them.

My own campus has several intro programming courses, some at the level of the AP CSP course.  I suspect that our campus would offer credit in these low-level courses for the AP CSP exam. These lowest-level courses do not count towards any major, though—they provide elective credit for what should be high-school level courses.  The intent (as is apparently the intent for AP CSP) is to provide an extremely low barrier to entry into the field.

I don’t know how well the low barrier to entry works, though.  I’ve not seen much evidence on our campus that the lowest level courses produce many students who continue to take higher level CS courses. Of course, I’ve not tried to get reports on that from the campus academic planning office, as I have enough to do without meddling in the affairs of other departments.  We still have appallingly low numbers of women finishing in CS (and the new game-design major within CS is even more heavily male), so I can’t say that the lower-level intro courses have done much to address the gender imbalance.

The success of CSP also depends on thousands of high schools suddenly deciding to teach the course and getting training for their teachers to do this. I (along with many others) have grave doubts that the schools have the desire or the ability to do this. It is true that the CSP course should be a bit easier to train people for than the current AP CS A course (if only because Java syntax, the core of CS A, is so deadly dull).

Even if, by some miracle, the NSF manages to train 10,000 teachers to program well enough to teach programming, the result is likely to be underwhelming.  I suspect that many will leave teaching—many of the math teacher bloggers I’ve followed who learned to program have moved out of teaching into being full-time programmers.    The result of the 10K project may not be a huge increase in high school CS teachers, but a loss of some of the better math teachers and the production of a core of under-trained programmers.

The justification for the new AP CSP course is that it will drive many more students in computing fields. The College Board continues to confuse correlation with causation:

Research shows that students who took college-level AP math or science exams during high school were more likely than non-AP students to earn degrees in physical science, engineering and life science disciplines — the fields leading to careers essential for the nation’s future prosperity.

Students wanting to do STEM fields in college often chose that path in high school, and took as many STEM courses as they could in order to get into good colleges.  Quite likely, wanting to do STEM in college caused them to take AP exams, not the other way around.

I’m not defending the current AP CS exam—from what I’ve heard about the AP CS A course and exam, it is mainly about Java syntax.  Personally, I think that Java is a poor pedagogical choice for a first programming language (I still favor the sequence Scratch, Python, C, Java), and using it as the language for the AP CS exam forces high schools into poor pedagogy.  The new CSP exam is not supposed to be so language-dependent, which may allow for better pedagogy.

Of course, I’m curious how the exam will be written to be language-independent, and whether it will be able to make any meaningful measurements of what the students have learned.  I’ve never been convinced that exams do an adequate job of measuring programming skills, and I’m not sure what the new exam will measure since the new course is “unlike computer science courses that focus on programming”.

I suspect that the easier AP CSP will replace AP CS A at many high schools, and that CS A will disappear the way that CS AB did in May 2009 (Gresham’s Law for pedagogy: easier courses drive out harder ones).  Whether this is a good or bad outcome depends on how good the AP CSP course turns out to be.

Overall, I’m simply not convinced that the College Board needs federal funding of $5.2 million to develop a new exam.  They are going to make enough money off the new exam that they should be able to fund it without subsidies.

Gettting high school students excited about programming

Allison Cuttler wrote  about a very successful intro to computer science (or programming, at least) at her high school:

When it comes down to it, what I’m feeling right now is probably what every teacher feels at some point—the magical epiphany that “A few weeks ago, my students didn’t know [what programming was], and now they’re [running home to work on coding challenges] and [saying that they want to study computer science in college].”

There were two parts to this success story:

• a one-hour introduction to programming, which was really a thinly disguised pitch for the computer science course we’ll be offering for the first time next year. I had my students warm up with a Do Now asking them to identify some of the many ways they rely on coding in their everyday lives, without even realizing it. I used this PowerPoint as a basis for our discussion, which led into this (now semi-viral) video put out by Code.org, and finally some live coding in Python (the Word Smoosher was a big hit).
• a visit by Jeremy Keeshin, cofounder of CodeHS.com. Thirty-two (out of 74) juniors from across the academic spectrum signed up for an after-school workshop that Jeremy ran to introduce students to some of the basics of coding as well as the terrific online platform for learning coding that he has developed. The program is such that students are able to watch short tutorial videos and work on challenges at their own pace, and Jeremy and I mainly circulated to help students troubleshoot …

It sounds like a very good beginning—I hope that the programming course that they are offering next year goes well.

Read the full story at via Infinigons, etc.: Have an hour to fill with your students?.

Storytelling to close the gender gap?

In Closing the Gender Gap in STEM Fields With Stories, Bethany Johnsen wrote an

Making science classes more “like that” is also the suggestion of a recent Scientific American blog post, To Attract More Girls to STEM, Bring More Storytelling to Science. Its authors, teachers at a STEM-focused high school, argue that the reason for the gender gap in the STEM fields is not a shortage of girls with ability, but the failure of our science curriculum to engage their interest and kindle their passion. The remedy they propose—telling the stories of science—could lend the STEM fields some of the allure traditionally left to the humanities.

While I agree that the shortage of women in STEM fields is not due to a shortage of girls with ability (the dominance of girls at middle school and high school science fairs is clear), I’m not convinced that a story-based approach is going to work. History of science is not science, and stories about scientists are not science. Replacing science instruction in middle and high school with stories and history would leave students less prepared to study and do real science, and more likely to choose a humanities field in college.

Note that there isn’t a gender gap in biology (at least not through grad school—there is still some gender gap in paid jobs), so the problem isn’t with “STEM” as a whole, but more specifically with the math and computation-based STEM fields.  Even among those fields, there are wide disparities, with math itself coming much closer to parity than physics or computer science.  Why?  Is it something about the field, about the way the field is taught, about the culture of the practitioners, or about the culture of the students currently majoring in those fields?

Making the science instruction more interesting is a good goal, but the suggestion of the SciAm blog post “How many engineering teachers include a fiction book like Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano in their syllabi?” seems to me to miss the point.  Replacing science and engineering with fiction reading will not result in more students studying engineering and science—it will result in students studying literature and thinking that they are studying science.

The basic idea—to use a more story-telling approach to teaching STEM—is a good one, but I think that the stories have to be intrinsic to the science and math, like Dan Meyer’s The Three Acts Of A Mathematical Story, not stories about science, which seems to be what both blogs are advocating.

I don’t know how successful approaches like “Storytelling Alice” have been—it is no longer available though the web page claims it was successful:

A study comparing middle school girls’ experiences with learning to program in Storytelling Alice and in a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice) showed that:

• Users of Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice.
• Users of Storytelling Alice were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time to program).
• Despite the focus on making programming more fun, users of Storytelling Alice were just as successful at learning basic programming concepts as users of Generic Alice.

Of course, Alice is not the most fun programming environment for middle schoolers (I think that Scratch beats it hands down), so the storytelling component may just have made it a bit better.  Has anyone ever attempted a Storytelling Scratch class? (I wasn’t able to find any equivalent to Storytelling Alice using Scratch in a very brief web search.)

The newest version of Scratch (2.0) runs as a Flash program in the browser, and has some new media-related features (like being able to interact with the video from the computer’s camera).  My son has played with it a bit, but I’ve not had time to explore the new features.  The Flash-based Scratch means that no installation is necessary to run programs, but that Scratch will not run on iOS devices (like iPads), which could be a limitation at many schools.  I understand that an iPAD app or HTML5 implementation of Scratch is planned, now that Scratch 2.0 has been released.

A better approach than stories about science may be to have more hands-on science and engineering, where students learn the science and engineering in order to accomplish something, not just to pass a course and get into college.  So far, most attempts along those lines have favored stereotypically “boy” goals (robot sports, for example, and video games), and so have not served to shrink the gender gap.

A physics teacher’s reaction to anti-science witch hunts

Frank Noschese, a physics teacher, has written a rather amusing “letter to parents” on his blog Dear Parents | Action-Reaction, including such gems as

Giggle-inducing Scientific Terminology. Uranus, excited state, naked singularity, panspermia, ram pressure, Trojans, black hole, galactic bulge, hadron, space probe, parsecs, and 21-centimeter emission, to name a few. These are not “dirty words.” They are official scientific terms and we will need to use them in class.

The post as a whole mocks the anti-science attitude of the Dietrich, Idaho parents who protested a 10th grade biology teacher using the word “vagina” in the unit about reproduction. [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/28/idaho-teacher-under-investigation-way-he-teaches-h/]

I guess that Idaho is racing Kansas to become the most anti-science state in the United States.

Santa Cruz County Science Fair 2013

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday judging at the Santa Cruz County Science Fair, which is always fun, but a little tiring.  This year I was the lead judge for the “Energy and Power” category, which had 14 projects in grades 4–5 and 14 in grades 6–8.  There were no high school projects in my category, and they decided to have interviews but not judging for K–3, so I ended up only talking briefly with the K–3 students and did not give them written feedback.  I interviewed 26 or 27 of the students in my category, and provided written feedback for each of them.  That written feedback is the most important part of the fair, and the judges in my category were all very diligent about providing detailed feedback, so most of the kids got 4 or 5 feedback forms.  In some other categories, a lot of the judges left without providing feedback, and a few kids ended up with no feedback forms. (I heard about it from some of the parents, because the administrator had left before the public viewing, and I was clearly identifiable as a judge—I wear a lab coat for judging science fair.)

The “energy and power” category is where all the lemon batteries end up, which makes it a rather sad category for judges.  Every category has a few projects that appear (usually very badly done) year after year. The lemon batteries are almost always terrible projects, with the students following rote directions from the web (in at least two cases this year, incorrectly) and having no understanding what they are doing.  I think that Science Buddies has a lot to answer for! The students seem to think that the power is coming from the fruit (rather than from the dissimilar metals) and that voltage is the same thing as power.

We also got the windmills, solar cells, wave generators, and thermoelectric devices. Those were generally a little bit better done—we actually had a pretty good solar cell project and a pretty good Peltier-device project. Because our fair does not have an engineering category (other than “environmental engineering”), we ended up with a number of the engineering projects as well (hovercrafts, ducted propellers, and the like).

There is a big need to train elementary school teachers (and to a lesser extent middle-school teachers) in science and engineering methods.  And I don’t mean the nonsense they teach about the “scientific method”, which bears almost no resemblance to any process of scientific or engineering work I’ve ever seen.  I mean that they need to know how to measure voltage, current, and resistance, and to be able to show kids how to compute power (it is not the same thing as voltage, nor is it the product of open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current).  Teachers should be able to show students how to build a simple calorimeter and measure energy from chemical reactions (like burning fuel). A lot of the students I interviewed were quite bright, but no one had ever taught them the basics they needed to be able to do their projects.  Nor have they been taught how to use the tools they have. I don’t want to see another student wrapping the loop for measuring AC current around a wire and claiming that they are measuring resistance, nor claims that lemon batteries produced 9 Amps at 1v.

Things I learned when I was 8–10 years old should be within reach of their teachers. I think that a few hours of professional development that involved them actually doing some measurements and learning the basics of some of the science and engineering projects would improve the quality of their students projects a lot. Every elementary school teacher should know how to use a hand saw, a drill, wire strippers, and a soldering iron, and they should be teaching the kids how to use them also.  (Yes, I can see the safety problems if you try to do it in a large class—but the safety problems in PE classes are far larger, but we haven’t thrown out all sports in schools because of it.)

Even just telling the teachers some basic ideas might help.  Some of the things I see repeatedly:

• Know what you are measuring (voltage is not power).
• Measure the right thing to answer the underlying question.
• Measure inputs as well as outputs (counting colonies tells you how many culturable bacteria or fungi were in your initial sample, which is useless if you don’t know how big the sample was).
• Don’t culture unknown micro-organisms (except in a lab with proper protection and sterilization equipment).
• Read (and cite) some material from the web. High school students should be going well beyond Wikipedia in their literature searches, but even a short Wikipedia seach would be a big step up for most of the middle school and elementary school students.  If Wikipedia is too difficult for an elementary school student (as it may well be), see if there is anything useful on Simple English Wikipedia.
• Good science fair projects take time, often with many false starts. There are way too many 1-week projects at the county science fair.
• Mentorship is good, but doing the work for the kid is not—especially not the interpretation of the results. This point is aimed more at the over-involved parents than the teachers—but judges have to be very careful, as there are some highly motivated kids doing things that look like adult work, but really are just the student.  (I remember an incident about a decade ago, of a kid in another category who was severely down graded by the judges in who thought they were judging a parental project, but I talked with the kid for 15 minutes later on and I was convinced that the work really was his alone.  I was angry at the judges for not being more careful in their judgements, but there was nothing I could do about it.)

It’s great to see the enthusiasm and talent of the K–3 group (which has been growing so rapidly that the hall that is rented for the Science Fair is no longer big enough), but that enthusiasm and talent seems to dissipate rapidly around middle school—there are still a lot good middle-school projects, but there are also a number of kids just going through the motions and only a few are continuing to do science fair once they are not required to.  I see more evidence of parental over-involvement at middle school than at elementary school (though that may be due to the selection processes at the different feeder schools, rather than inherent in the age groups).  I didn’t see any evidence of over-involvement in my category this year—if anything, I saw the opposite, with students not getting critical guidance so that they could do a really meaningful project.

One very sad part of the county science fair is how few high school students participate.  There are no school-level fairs in our county at the high school level, and little or no encouragement of individual projects.  This year I think we had 23 projects from high school students, out of a population of about 7500 high school students—about 0.3%.    According to the statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the various STEM categories add up to about 6% of the workforce (not counting healthcare, which would double the number, and not counting several related occupations, like high-school science teachers, scientific sales, science and engineering managers, …).  So even with very conservative counting, we’re short by a factor of 20 in this county.  I’d be satisfied if even 1–2% of the high school students were entering science fair, but we’re nowhere close to that number, and the participation at the high-school level is shrinking, not growing, each year.

The problem is not strictly a local one—most places see a drop in participation from middle school to high school, but I don’t think many are as extreme as here.  There are some places in the US where high school science fair is big—what have they done differently?

Lots of organizations have seen the problem of high school students losing interest in science fair, and they have put up cash prizes and other incentives for high school students, but (in this county anyway), no one is taking the bait.  We need to find a way to get high-school students excited about doing science or engineering projects, and I don’t know what would stimulate that excitement.

Many (most?) of the good projects in middle school and high school came from home-schooled kids or kids getting a lot of after-school education from mentors or parents.  This may be related to the point that good science fair projects take time and require passion on the part of the students, and the local schools (public, private, and charter) don’t provide a good environment for projects that take time nor for students to show passion—way too much busywork and time wasted preparing for standardized tests.