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In the past decade, academic computing curricular guidelines have shifted from specifying knowledge and occasionally technical skills to establishing the overall competence expected of graduates. For instance, Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) guidelines identify competency as knowledge, skills, and dispositions where “dispositions” correspond to the behavioral and professional characteristics driven by employer needs and captured by industry-driven frameworks, such as the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Computing programs thus must also ensure that graduates have these characteristics to improve initial employment and long-term career prospects. This paper aims to understand and achieve consistency between academia and industry curricular frameworks. The CC2020 dispositions map to the responsibility characteristics for SFIA Level 3, the level appropriate for a new graduate. As the mapping is not one-to-one, the paper reviews the extent to which each SFIA responsibility characteristic requires and enables the CC22020 dispositions, identifying potential shortcomings and, conversely, the importance of each disposition as it supports the responsibility characteristics. The developed mapping is validated by relating the CC2020 dispositions to the SFIA behavioral factors, the principal “21st Century Skills,” and relevant competency-based educational frameworks. Thus, dispositions in competency-focused curricula map to the actual competencies sought by employers. Finally, the paper postulates that future computing curricula must further develop the CC2020 dispositions and relate them to SFIA to guide academic programs in their preparation of career-ready graduates to reduce the current “skills gap”.
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Advancing Computing Education: Assessing CC2020 Dispositions
This Innovative Practice Full Paper addresses the assessment of dispositions which, along with knowledge and skills, form the three legs of competency needed to perform a task in context, as described in recent computing curricular reports, particularly ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020). Here, dispositions in CC2020 express the behavioral characteristics of competence, such as being adaptable, collaborative, or inventive. Instructors have assessed knowledge from the start of computing programs and have paid increased attention to assessing skills in recent decades. However, dispositions and their role within competency is relatively new, with little guidance available for assessing dispositions. Lately, computing instructors have begun to understand the importance of evaluating dispositions during the performance of tasks in the real world or in the context of the industry-based global Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Hence, this paper develops a criterion-based approach for use by educators in assessing competence based on a reflective portfolio of "real-world" achievements. Building on concepts developed by the UK Institute of Coding and other recent reports, this work demonstrates how this assessment approach relates to industry-based competency frameworks such as SFIA and the European e-Competence Framework (eCF). The paper also explores using the criterion-based approach in a classroom environment to help students focus on particular dispositions. Its main contribution is to advance the competency focus in academic computing programs and future computing curricula.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2110771
- PAR ID:
- 10405672
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 9
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962670
