
A new pedagogy to address the unacknowledged failure of American secondary CS ed - tsumnia
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3381026
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tsumnia
Key Takeaways from Scott Portnoff (Author) from the SIGCSE Mailing List:

Part 1 argues that the survey courses ECS and APCSP have questionable, if any,
value in terms of content or pedagogy, and have perpetuated an inequitable
2-tier system in large urban school districts like Los Angeles USD. District
data for the 2018 and 2019 APCSP exams reveals overwhelming failure rates for
under-represented minority (URM) students, precisely the demographic groups
the course was meant to benefit.

Part 2 discusses a pre-APCSA programming course that incorporates
instructional strategies to address a crucial and missing pedagogic piece -
the teaching of programming languages as languages per se - in order to
counter the effects of the decades-old Novice Programmer Failure Problem.
Cognitive evidence supporting this approach now include 3 fMRI studies
concluding that understanding of programming languages occurs in the language
processing regions of the brain, not math, not logic. If scaled, this pedagogy
could better prepare all students, but particularly URMs, for successful
completion of the APCSA course and exam, and so boost successful participation
rates in college.

Part 3 showcases a concrete example of this approach using Codingbat. Grammar
rules can be thought of as generalizations of language patterns. Instructional
strategies therefore focus on providing repetitive and incrementally more
complex practice with (a) Patterns to clarify how API methods, control
structures, parameters, variables, and like syntactic features themselves are
used, and (b) Patterns that combine these features in crafting solutions to
specific types of beginner problems, prioritizing coding paradigms that are
clear and simple.

