Formative Assessment Practices in High School Classrooms - Experiences of a High School Teacher Teaching Engineering Design Curriculum

Iqbal, Assad; Carberry, Adam; Dalal, Medha

doi:10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342920

Traditionally, computer science (CS) in the United States has been an elective subject at the high school level. In recent years, however, some school systems have created a CS graduation requirement. Designing a required CS course that meets the needs of anticipated future advancements in the field necessitates exploring the research question, To better understand what these different groups perceive to be the essential content of a foundational high school CS course, we conducted a series of focus groups. These focus groups explored participants' (n = 21) thinking about what content would be most important to prioritize in a required high school CS course. Transcripts of the focus groups were abductively coded and then analyzed to determine what CS content priorities were identified and what disagreements about priorities exist. We found that participants (1) emphasized CS knowledge and skills, with minimal reference to dispositions, (2) prioritized content similar to that found in current CS standards, (3) developed broad, high-level descriptions of content, (4) identified contextually relevant factors, (5) foregrounded AI both a tool and as a subdomain of CS, and (6) emphasized computational thinking. These findings can inform further research on the design and implementation of a required high school CS course designed to meet the needs of the future as well as to support revisions of CS standards for high school students.

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