Mark Guzdial

University of Michigan | U-M · Division of Computer Science and Engineering

In this study, support for teaching data literacy in social studies is provided through the design of a pedagogical support system informed by participatory design sessions with both pre‐service and in‐service social studies teachers. It provides instruction on teaching and learning data literacy in social studies, examples of standards‐based lesso...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications , we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Arquilla analyzes the latest in a long line of cyber intrus...

Incorporating equity and inclusion in the effort toward access for everyone.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications , we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Arquilla considers responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, w...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers how few U.S. high school studen...

A task-specific programming language (TSPL) is a domain-specific programming language (in programming languages terms) designed for a particular user task (in human-computer interaction terms). Users of task-specific programming are able to use the tool to complete useful tasks, without prior training, in a short enough period that one can imagine...

An estimated 35% of high school principals across the U.S. report teaching computer science (CS) at their schools, according to a 2018 code.org access report. Meanwhile, a growing number of organizations have missions of providing computer science to all students in primary and secondary schools. In order to reach all students with CS, we need to u...

Social studies educators often use stories to convey historical changes over time. Data visualizations are powerful tools that can help illustrate and investigate these stories and the questions surrounding them. The ability to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and use data and data visualizations - known as data literacy - has become an increasingly i...

Prior research has shown that sketching out a code trace on paper is correlated with higher scores on code reading problems. Why do students sometimes choose not to draw out a code trace, or if they do, choose a different sketching technique than their instructor has demonstrated? In this study, we interviewed 13 CS1 students retrospectively about...

Modern learning theories emphasize the critical social aspect of learning. Computer science (CS) classrooms often have "defensive climates'' that inhibit social learning and prevent the development of a community of learners. We believe that we can improve the social context of computer science learning by expanding CS learning beyond the single st...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial mulls the difficulty of getting into a co...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Robin K. Hill considers the nature of variables, while...

As we celebrate the 50th SIGCSE Symposium, this panel explores how computing education researchers chart a course individually and as a community to build our research practices and collective knowledge of computing education. This navigation involves developing our research goals, which tools we use to work towards those goals, and which academic...

Efforts to improve and promote CS education characterized by greater participation of underrepresented groups have taken off sharply in the six years since the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) NSF alliance was first funded. Though many of these initiatives are occurring at the student and teacher level, ECEP and other national-level or...

Teaching programming as a way to express ideas, communicate with others, and understand our world is one of the oldest goals for computing education. The inventor of the term "computer science" saw it as the third leg of STEM literacy. In this talk, I lay out the history of the idea of universal computational literacy, some of what it will take to...

Cambridge Core - Education, History, Theory - The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research - edited by Sally A. Fincher

The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research - edited by Sally A. Fincher February 2019

The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research - edited by Sally A. Fincher February 2019

ACM SIGCSE is the oldest and best-known organization supporting computing education in the world today. Over 1700 attendees participated in the 2018 SIGCSE Technical Symposium, an indication of the importance of SIGCSE. SIGCSE's 50 years almost perfectly matches the history of computing education. SIGCSE has defined the focus of computing education...

Socioeconomic status (SES) has a measurable impact on many educational outcomes and likely also influences computer science (CS) achievement. We present a novel model to account for the observed connections between SES and CS achievement. We examined possible mediating variables between SES and CS achievement, including spatial ability and access t...

Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, are an untapped resource for understanding student knowledge in computing education. This paper develops a conceptual framework to support future studies of learning and teaching that incorporate gesture studies in programming contexts. In particular, this paper introduces how gesture h...

Seeking the best measures to reach advantaged and less-advantaged students equally.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers an idea with significant education...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers the enormous opportunity costs...

Computer science teachers want to know what their students are and are not learning and understanding. Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, could help teachers understand what their students are thinking. During communication, gestures often reflect thoughts not expressed when people talk (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005). Li...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the [email protected] community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Arquilla considers the growth of cyberattacks on...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Robin K. Hill mulls an aspect of natural language processing r...

Online education is an important tool for supporting the growing number of teachers and students in computer science. We created two eBooks containing interactive content for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles, one targeted at teachers and one at students. By comparing the eBook usage patterns of these populations, including activity us...

Sketching out a code trace is a cognitive assistance for programmers, student and professional. Previous research (Lister et al. 2004) showed that students who sketch a trace on paper had greater success on code 'reading' problems involving loops, arrays, and conditionals. We replicated this finding, and developed further categories of student sket...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Undergraduates who understand the importance of computer scien...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial suggests a new balance is needed in computer scie...

Using a "boot camp" workshop for new faculty orientation.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Arquilla considers how we should interpret the alleged Ru...

In January 2016, US President Barack Obama started an initiative to provide CS for All -- with the goal that all school students should have access to computing education. Computing departments in higher education have a particularly important role to play in this initiative. It's in our best interest to get involved, since the effort can potential...

In this workshop participants will receive an overview of teaching practices in computer science that research indicates are effective. While the field of computer science education is young, it has uncovered several teaching practices that can be adopted by instructors that can improve both the retention and performance of students. These evidence...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers the steps needed to reach the goal of C...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial reports on promising papers, and Daniel Reed recal...

Seeking to make computing education as available as mathematics or science education.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr gets high schoolers thinking about CS, while Mark...

Computing education lags other discipline-based education research in the number and range of validated assessments available to the research community. Validated assessments are important for researchers to reduce experimental error due to flawed assessments and to allow for comparisons between different experiments. Although the need is great, bu...

Several countries are trying to provide access to computing education for all secondary students. However, there are not enough teachers who are prepared to teach computer science. Interactive electronic books (ebooks) are a promising approach for providing low-cost professional development in computer science. Over the last four years, our researc...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Langford on AlphaGo, Bertrand Meyer on Research as Resear...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers the crucial role of states in Computer...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial examines a logical fallacy in consumer science ed...

The rapid integration of technology into our professional and personal lives has left many education systems ill-equipped to deal with the influx of people seeking computing education. To improve computing education, we are applying techniques that have been developed for other procedural fields. The present study applied such a technique, subgoal...

We report on a study that used subgoal labels to teach students how to write while loops with a Parsons problem learning assessment. Subgoal labels were used to aid learning of programming while not overloading students' cognitive abilities. We wanted to compare giving learners subgoal labels versus asking learners to generate subgoal labels. As an...

Validated assessments are important for teachers and researchers. A validated assessment is carefully developed to make sure that it is measuring the right things. Computing education needs more and better validated assessments. Validated assessments provide instructors with insight on how their students are doing in their class and provide researc...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial issues a "call to action" to encourage high schoo...

Influencing computer science education at the state level.

In this experiment, we integrated two learning methods – subgoal learning and constructive learning – to explore their interactions and effects on solving computer programming problems. We taught learners to solve problems using worked example and practice problem pairs with one of three kinds of instructional design that either did not highlight t...

RESPECT'15, the first international conference of the IEEE Computer Society Special Technical Community on Broadening Participation, was held this August in conjunction with the STARS Celebration in Charlotte, NC. Themes from the conference provide research-based evidence of what's working and what's left to be done to support broadening participat...

Computing education is in enormous demand. Many students (both children and adult) are realizing that they will need programming in the future. This book presents the argument that they are not all going to use programming in the same way and for the same purposes. What do we mean when we talk about teaching everyone to program? When we target a br...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Moshe Y. Vardi ponders the outlook for people when all work is...

There are too few secondary school computing teachers to meet international needs for growing secondary school computing education. Our group has created an ebook to help prepare secondary teachers to teach the programming and big data concepts in the new AP Computer Science Principles course. The ebook was designed using principles from educationa...

We share a vision of a society that is able to express problems and ideas computationally. Andrea diSessa called that computational literacy, and he invented the Boxer Programming Environment to explore the media of computational literacy. Education has the job of making citizens literate. Education systems around the world are exploring the questi...

Privilege is an unearned, unasked-for advantage gained because of the way society views an aspect of a student's identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and language. Privilege may provide advantages to some students, and under-privileged students may face unfair barriers to success in education. We review and analyze exist...

The leaders of organizations dedicated to broadening participation briefly present their best practices and lessons learned, and engage with the RESPECT and STARS audiences in a lively discussion about the future of broadening participation work and research.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers how the variety of learning outcomes an...

Educational psychology findings indicate that active processing (such as self-testing) is more effective for learning than passive reading or even rereading. Electronic books (ebooks) can include much more than static pictures and text. Ebooks can promote better learning by increasing the reader's interaction with the material through multi-modal l...

Recent empirical results suggest that the instructional material used to teach computing may actually overload students' cognitive abilities. Better designed materials may enhance learning by reducing unnecessary load. Subgoal labels have been shown to be effective at reducing the cognitive load during problem solving in both mathematics and scienc...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial says computer science teachers should use more ev...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Langford examines the results of the NIPS experiment, whi...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr considers how attitude can impact teacher effecti...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial questions the practice of teaching programming to...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial reports on the 2014 meeting of the ACM Education...

Preparing teachers to teach computing is more than a matter of re-purposing existing courses for computer science majors. The tasks, knowledge, and skills of a computing teacher in primary or secondary school are dramatically different than that of a software developer. Computing teachers need pedagogical content knowledge, which includes awareness...

An enormous challenge to computing education in secondary schools worldwide is the lack of secondary computer science teachers. The Institute for Computing Education (ICE) has been offering teacher professional development in an attempt to increase the quantity and quality of secondary computing teachers in Georgia in the United States of America s...

Seeking to address the most important issues facing the computer education research community.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow use on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCAM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial suggests computer science education needs to be a...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm John Langford considers how to stand out when seeking a resear...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers the consequences of requiring all schoo...

A student's capacity to learn a concept is directly related to how much cognitive load is used to comprehend the material. The central problem identified by Cognitive Load Theory is that learning is impaired when the total amount of processing requirements exceeds the limited capacity of working memory. Instruction can impose three different types...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers the "poor learnability" of programming...

Computing education has some significant education challenges today. We aren't diverse enough, and we need to be able to develop more teachers. Despite popular opinion, the current generations of MOOCs don't meet those needs.

Georgia Computes! (GaComputes) was a six-year (2006-2012) project to improve computing education across the state of Georgia in the United States, funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of GaComputes was to broaden participation in computing and especially to engage more members of underrepresented groups which includes women, African...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial considers why computing education lags behind oth...

We examine the current state of computing education in the United States, in order to be able to identify problems in diversity and performance. Data on computing education are difficult to come by, since computer science courses are not tracked in US public education systems. By using a large and nationwide quantitative data source, we can gain ne...

Why would individuals who are capable of learning opt not to? Learning is important for stability and success. It would seem rational that students in groups that are frequently underrepresented or marginalized would be motivated to learn. However, negotiation of multiple identities and self-beliefs can impact motivations to learn. For example, you...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial assesses the first full year of massive open onli...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial ponders a new set of research questions, while Va...

Computing is the new literacy, and teaching computing in a world where computers are ubiquitous demands new techniques and contexts for learning. As these evolve, so too will the student profile.

Research in computing education has been criticized as "Marco Polo," e.g., the researchers tried something and reported what happened. Our developing field needs more hypothesis-driven and theory-driven research. We will get there by making clear our goals and hypotheses, testing those goals and hypotheses explicitly, and critically reconsidering o...

How pair programming, peer instruction, and media computation have improved computer science education.

The phenomena of social computing are not primarily about technology. What is interesting about our modern computing milieu is the blend of technology, humans, and community. Human-centered computing is a new subdiscipline of computer science that prepares students for studying our socio-technical world. DiSalvo explored her question with ethnograp...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Jeannette M. Wing considers how technology acts as a change ag...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial sees hope in computer science education efforts i...

In his SIGCSE 2007 keynote, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to sessions that have provided a forum for sharing: What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to trumpet; What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our...

The demand for computing professionals continues to grow, while women and minorities remain severely underrepresented at all levels. This opening SIGCSE 2013 keynote asks the crucial question "What can WE do to change the face of computing?" Several ...