On a Metodology for Creating School Curricula in Computing by K. Manev and N. Maneva

An article by Krassimir Manev, Department of Informatics, New Bulgarian University and President of IOI 2014-2017, and Neli Maneva,  Bulgarian Academie of Science, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics for the "Olympiads in Informatics" vol. 11 book (2017).

As defined in The Glossary of Education Reform (Glossary, 2017): “The term curriculum refers to the lessons and academic content taught in a school or in a specific course or program“. Very frequently the word is used to denote just the list of courses offered by a school, but such understanding of the term is more appropriate for some external use – to demonstrate briefly to the community or some institutions the essence of the proposed education. Here we will consider the notion in its depth. As the above mentioned Glossary underlines: “… curriculum typically refers to the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn …” which includes:

• The learning standards or learning objectives the students are expected to meet.
• The units and lessons that teachers teach.
• The assignments and projects given to students.
• The learning resources – books, materials, videos, presentations and readings, used in a course.
• The assessment resources – tests, tasks, projects and other materials used to evaluate student’s learning.
  
  

(...)

After presenting the national reports of the participants in a Workshop a natural question raised: Is it possible to have universal and unique ISCC? The opinion of the most of the participants was that it seems impossible. Some arguments for this are listed below:

•  The general educational structure of different countries presented in the Workshop is very different! We expect that if a larger number of countries decide to apply such ISCC then the differences will be even more drastic.
• The Countries have various history of introducing education in Computing and so – different level of experience in teaching these disciplines, different traditions, different quantity and quality of teachers, different computing resources, etc.
• The specific structure of the economy of the countries supposes different models of school education in Computing. For example, some countries with developed software industries will need a model which is different from the model of countries in which there is no such industry and there no intentions to develop it. That is why it seems more realistic that not a single Curriculum but many different Curricula have to be created even in one specific country. The question is: are we able to predict what exactly will be necessary for education in Computing in each country, depending of its specific needs and to predefine some fixed number of Curricula, developing them in depth. The answer again is – rather not! That is 96 Kr. Manev, N. Maneva why it seems more appropriate for our goals a set of curriculum elements to be developed as well as guidance for using these elements in order to create many specific curricula. Good example for such kind of activity are the mentioned above efforts of the professional organizations ACM and IEEE-CS to elaborate and maintain during the years a system of curriculum elements and guidance for creating specific curricula in Computing for the university stage of education. That is why these efforts are resumed in the next chapter as well as a proposal how the methodology of ACM-IEEE curricula guidance group could be tuned for our goals.

ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula Guidance

ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula Guidance is not a single methodical act. It has about 20 years history. It is a persistent work of the ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula Guidance work group, which started with a single recommendations updated on a regular base through the year that recently led to specific recommendation for the different fields of the Computing domain. That is why this important work could be a model for creating and future maintenance of corresponding guidance for development of the ISCC.

The ACM-IEEE curriculum guidance work groups are based on some principles, that seem to be applicable to our goals:

• Curriculum guidance should not only identify the fundamental knowledge and skills of the domain but should provide a methodology for creating specific courses, defining their content and the appropriate order of teaching them.
• The required body of knowledge must be as small as possible.
• Curriculum guidance must strive to be international in scope, broadly based and must include professional practice as an integral component.
• The rapid evolution of Computing requires an ongoing review of the corresponding curricula recommendations through the years.
• Curriculum guidance must be sensitive to progress in technology, pedagogy and lifelong learning.
  
  3.2. Structure 
  
  
• Computing is a broad, scientific and practical human activity domain including a corpus of teaching elements – both theoretical (knowledge) and practical (skills), having computers as main objects – their creation as well as their programming and usage. On a Metodology for Creating School Curricula in Computing 97
• Body of knowledge of the domain describes it‘s fundamental concepts, theories and notions. Core of knowledge specifies the body of knowledge elements, for which there exists a broad consensus that they are essential for the education in the domain. Body of knowledge is hierarchically structured in fields, areas, units and topics.
• Learning objectives are composed of two parts – a set of requirements that all students should be able to meet and set of requirements to promote individual assessment of each student achievements.
• Curriculum models present different approaches for organizing the educational process among which the creator of a specific Curriculum could choose. ACMIEEE guidance considers three level of models – introductory, intermediate, and advanced.
• The part Course descriptions contains detailed description of the courses – both compulsory and elective. Course is the main structural object of each curriculum. One discipline could be covered by one or more courses and one course could be dedicated to one or more disciplines. Some other parts of the guidance structure could be also considered on the next stages of development of guidance for ISCC.

(...) We propose to use the body of knowledge from the version of ACM-IEEE guidance from 2001 and, after a broad discussion/questioning in IOI community and outside, to extract the areas and the units that are appropriate for the school. It will be necessary for sure to append some units or/and topics that are considered nowadays not appropriate or not necessary for the universities, but are important for school students. As the presentation of the countries that participated in the Workshop shows, there is some corpus of knowledge in the area IT (let us call it computing literacy) that is traditionally studied in schools, but not as university program, and have to find place in ISCC. The units of core of knowledge have to be identified as a result of the discussion/questioning mentioned above. Further we can choose an appropriate quantity of class hours for each unit. A similar process of deleting/appending has to be done for the individual topics of each included in the body unit (core or elective). In parallel, the corresponding educational objectives have to be edited with the respect of the age of the student. It is quite possible that in our recommendations we will have to define few alternative versions of the learning objectives connected with each individual topic, unit and even area, depending on the chosen educational model.

Identifying the necessary educational model in our case will be the most important and difficult task. As mentioned above the model is the element of each curriculum that has to introduce a flexibility in the process of creating curricula. This will be our instrument to cover as many as possible concepts of organization of education on different age levels of the school, as well as of the different kind of schools. Let us start with the levels of education which exist in the educational system of each country (and could be different). In most countries there are three levels in secondary school – primary, intermediate and high. In Bulgarian system, for example, two models exist for the level of education:

• 1–4 grades as primary, 5–8 grades as intermediate, 9–12 grades as high.
•  1–4 grades as primary, 5–7, grades as intermediate, 8–12 grades as high.

The trend is the first of them to be eliminated soon or later. There is also trend to separate the high level to two sublevels 8–10 grades and 11–12 grades in order to give a possibility for some specialization in the sublevel 11–12 of the students. Similar subdivision is predicted in (Computer Science, 2012). In addition we have to consider also existence of some special schools – mathematical, language, art, sport, professional, etc. That is why it is necessary to define very carefully the core units of the body of knowledge which to be common for the national educational system in order to give to each student, graduated in secondary school the possibility to continue her/his education in an university program of Computing does not matter in what kind of school is graduated. As well as to classify the elective units of the body in such a way that the curricula for the specialized schools to include the most appropriate for the peculiarities of the school elective units. In Bulgarian system, for example, the courses are classified in 3 categories – compulsory, compulsory-elective (which means that the students have to take m among the proposed set of n such courses) and free-elective (which means that students are not obliged at all but could take as many such courses as they would like). In last category the corresponding school could include any course which is appropriate to the profile of the school (professional school of machine engineering, for example, could include learning of one CAD/CAM system, which is inappropriate for other schools). Is it possible to define different kind of models also on the base of preferred main fields – CS-oriented (most appropriate for mathematical and engineering schools), IToriented (more appropriated for language, art and sport schools), CS&IT-oriented (more appropriated for regular schools), etc.

The most important difference between university models (we mean the classic universities but not the so called liberal art, where the educational model is more close to the models of secondary schools) and the school models is that in the university pro and the school models is that in the university programs in the domain of Computing in each moment students take few courses from the domain. In secondary school model we will have in each moment only one or maximum two courses in the domain with 1-4 class hours per week – asking for more class hours for Computing nowadays seems not realistic.

So the model has to include some „class hours per week“ scheme, which defines the grade, number of courses, class hours per week and distribution of the class hours between the two courses (or between IT and CS if the model includes only one course).

Read more about the implementation of the model and the full article here.